Generics and Germany

The recent Hal2 meeting in Germany has now had some talks posted online. Only one is in English, but it's a nice talk on generic programming. It even mentions my Uniplate library, which was nice to see. There were two points made that I completely agree with:

• There are lots of generics libraries for Haskell, and even an expert in the field has no hope of understanding all the different design decisions in all the libraries. When writing the related work section for Uniplate it quickly became apparent that to just read all the papers that were related would take forever. Libraries like Control.Applicative can be used for generic programming, but even the authors have "barely begun to explore" its potential. There are lots of libraries, and new ones are still being written. An explosion of ideas is not a bad thing, but at some point some focus will be required.


• The second point is that very few people use generic programming. Generic programming has the potential to massively reduce the volume of code - some real programs that use Uniplate had some complicated functions shrink by five times. Sadly, lots of the generic programming libraries have a rather steep learning curve, and use concepts uncommon in standard Haskell programs. Even given the difficulty at the start, generic programming is certainly worth it in the end, but very few people take the time to learn it. Perhaps once there are a few more users we will get things like a "Generic Programming and Nuclear Waste Tutorial", and the usage will snowball from there.

My interest in generic programming stems from writing programs that manipulate the abstract syntax of a core Haskell-like language. I was completely unaware of all the generics work, and so started to experiment and invent my own library. Almost three years later, after gaining lots of experience about what I did wrong, I had refined Uniplate to the point where I could not imagine programming without it. Had I discovered Scrap Your Boilerplate originally, I probably would not have continued to develop my ideas.

Given the steep learning curve of generic programming, I have deliberately tried to keep Uniplate as simple as possible. I have also tried to write the first two sections of my Uniplate paper from the view of a user, in a slightly tutorial style. If you have a data type with three or more constructors, and perform operations which involve "walking over" values in some way, Uniplate can probably help.

I will be presenting Uniplate at the Haskell Workshop on the 30th of September 2007, and will put the slides up after I return. I will also be presenting Supero (my optimiser) at the IFL conference beforehand, on the 27th. If you are in Germany for IFL/HW/ICFP do come and say hello - my photo is on my website.