Interesting Stuff #5

Piotr Moczurad - Visual-textual functional programming with Luna at LambdaDays 2018

Is Luna is ultimate come back of the visual development paradigm, proposed this time in a functional flavour? In a few words, it is a technology allowing to visually program functional pipelines for data manipulation.

I haven’t tried it myself, but I can easily imagine use cases as a visual DSL intended to be used by non-programmers domain exports, to allow them manipulate data on their own.

Here is a Fun Fun Function video showing Luna in action, giving us a better visualisation of what may be achievable with the technology.

Category theory for programmers by Bartosz Milewski

A lecture about category theory by Bartosz Milewski, from zero to hero.

Contrary to a lot of content about category theory, this one is really progressive, and very well taught. It lasts several hours, and so represents for the viewer a non-negligible investment in time, but it is worth it (and the running time is surely the reason why it is so progressive: hard things take time to learn!).

What we talk about when we talk about monads - Tomas Petricek

The history of our representations of the concept of monad, as seen by mathematicians and programmers, and the answer to the great question: why does learning what a monad is always seems so hard, even though it is a rather simple construction?

This paper is well written, and dives into the untold part of the monad saga. And even if it claims that it is not a description of what a monad is, it provides one of the finest ways to truly understand what a monad truly is.