I apologize for my miscommunication and ignorance. First, the bragging was supposed to be on behalf of the Clojure ecosystem rather than myself. Second, while I am aware of the standard lens implementations in Haskell and Scalaz, I didn't see that either dealt nicely with intra-path transformations, and the Scalaz version didn't seem very concise. If there are more examples, or if I'm wrong about these, I would love to learn more.
I agree that the interaction with typed Clojure is not ideal, but at least there's an interaction of some sort, albeit possibly a "hack." Googling "van Laarhoven" has led me to a few hours of reading material and to SPJ's talk, so thanks for that...
Could you demonstrate a simple example of the intra-path transformation? I am not sure that I see exactly how it should be implemented, but so long as it isn't a lens law violation I think you can do it in Haskell's lens system at least.
I was thinking of setting ```:c``` in ```{:a {:b "{:c 5}"}}```. More generally, a leaf in the container tree that is not itself a container but can be converted to and from one.
I need to play more with http://hackage.haskell.org/package/lens, but I'd certainly appreciate a shortcut to enlightenment...
1. Focusing on "the subtree" instead of "the value
at the subtree"
2. Working with data types like `{:a {:b {:c 5}}}` is
somewhat uncommon in Haskell (too little information
gets projected into the types)
3. Doing "along the way parsing"
Each of those are fine to do in Haskell and I could work up an example. Perhaps the best domain for this is using the lens-aeson[0] package since your data type is not so different from JSON. Here you can use the _JSON prism to do your "along the way parsing" (the failure mechanism of prisms catches failed parses naturally). You can also focus on whole subtrees naturally (since the JSON Value type is just a sum over subtrees and values all together, so the natural parametricity distinction is lost).
So I'd look at [0] for a wealth of examples in that vein. I'd also look into zipper lenses. They were removed in more recent versions (I think anticipating splitting them out into another package) but they're available in the 3.* series [1].
Yes, lens-aeson looks pretty damn close. I've got a bunch of reading to do.
The existence of zipper lenses catches me by surprise, as I have been frequently directed at a stackoverflow [0] response on the difference between the two...
I'm the author of the non-accepted answer to that question. For what it's worth, I think cgrand's is weak in describing both zippers and lenses, but ultimately lands on the wrong distinction.
