amen zwa, esq. · @AmenZwa
125 followers · 1354 posts · Server mathstodon.xyz

I just published "PDF: purely functional data structures in " on GitHub.

These are Elm reimplementations of the data structures presented in the book " " (1999) by Prof. Okasaki. It is the only one of its kid that I am aware. It is a tour de force of functional thinking. The book includes and implementations.

Okasaki is a descendant of the ML tradition. His PhD advisor at CMU during the mid 1990s was Prof. Harper who wrote "Programming in Standard ML" (2011), contributed to the definition of the language, and was a member of the ML posse, alongside Milner, Tofte, Reppy, MacQueen, et al.

I chose for the following reasons:

• Elm is a purely functional language
• Elm does not yet have a comprehensive library of data structures
• Elm evolves at a deliberate pace, with subsuming to the modern CI/CD pipeline pressure
• Elm is one of the simplest languages
• Elm is sane
• These properties make Elm a good candidate for use in education, for teaching FP, for teaching data structures, and for teaching disciplined web programming, and a comprehensive collection of data structures could be of use in undergraduate education

An unstated, but no less important, reason for my choosing Elm is Python fatigue. I currently use Python at work, and I am also expanding my "CLRS algorithms in Jupyter notebooks" project. I like Python, but many hours of Python a day is deleterious to my . Elm is both the prophylactic and the cure.

Please note that both PDF and CLRS are my solo projects, and they are works in progress that grow incrementally. Both projects aim to help undergraduate students.

github.com/amenzwa/pfd

#mentalhealth #cs #fp #haskell #standardml #datastructures #functional #purely #elm

Last updated 2 years ago