Why The Hell Should I Care About Lens? (Part 2)

Posted on December 18, 2018
Tags: ,

So last time we looked at lens and saw had to jump into record-shaped structures and change things around like big hacker professionals. However we didn’t try to change anything with a sum type in it, like Either or Maybe or something. What can we use for that? Only a bloody Prism, apparently.

Here’s an example sum type that can either contain a dog’s name or it’s age, and is in no way utterly contrived.

data DogFact = DogName String | DogAge Int

Here are some examples of it is in use. Here it is valiantly holding a dog’s name, a String, with the DogName constructor.

spruceBruce :: DogFact
spruceBruce = DogName "Spruce Bruce"

Great!

And here, instead, is a dog’s age, stored as an Int inside DogAge.

oldDog :: DogFact
oldDog = DogAge 100

Excellent stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Now, we could start making all our getters and settings by hand again like this…

getDogNameFromDogFact :: DogFact -> Maybe String
getDogNameFromDogFact (DogName s) = Just s
getDogNameFromDogFact _           = Nothing

getDogAgeFromDogFact :: DogFact -> Maybe Int
getDogAgeFromDogFact (DogAge s) = Just s
getDogAgeFromDogFact _          = Nothing

…but I’m sure it’s clear it’s soon going to get quite verbose and we should probably use something more clever instead.

Enter Prism! (the crowd goes wild, etc.)

A Prism is like a Lens, except it let’s you peek into a particular part of a sum type. Therefore we can make one Prism that is interested in the name of dogs…

dogNamePrism :: Prism' DogFact String
dogNamePrism = prism' DogName (\e -> case e of
                                DogName a -> Just a
                                _         -> Nothing)

…and another which only cares about the age of dogs…

dogAgePrism :: Prism' DogFact Int
dogAgePrism = prism' DogAge (\e -> case e of
                              DogAge b -> Just b
                              _        -> Nothing)

OK. So how do we use them?

In lens, we had view for peeking inside, set for changing values, and over for mapping over the values inside. What has Prism got going on?

preview

Unlike lens which has set, prism has a good pal called preview that it uses for checking out values. It returns the result inside a Maybe as the value is not guaranteed to actually be there.

dogAge :: Maybe Int
dogAge = preview dogAgePrism (DogAge 100)
-- dogAge == Just 100

That seems reasonable.

What about running that on spruceBruce (that is built from a DogName)?

notDogAge :: Maybe Int
notDogAge = preview dogAgePrism spruceBruce
-- notDogAge == Nothing

No dice. Zero dice. A complete lack of dice. No age, no int, sorry.

Maybe our dogNamePrism can help though…?

dogName :: Maybe String
dogName = preview dogNamePrism spruceBruce
-- dogName == Just "Spruce Bruce"

Yes! Good stuff. Does he work on ages though?

notDogName :: Maybe String
notDogName = preview dogNamePrism (DogAge 69)
-- notDogName == Nothing

No. Damn.

set

In lens we used set for changing the value of something nested. How does that work here?

youngerDog :: DogFact
youngerDog = set dogAgePrism 27 (DogAge 100)
-- youngerDog == DogAge 27

All seems well here, pretty similar to a regular lens. How about we give our dog a name instead of an age?

noNewName :: DogFact
noNewName = set dogNamePrism "Nice Name" (DogAge 100)
-- noNewName == DogAge 100

What’s happened here? Where is the name? We’ve ended up with exactly what we started with! How the hell do we give the dog a name? I must admit this confused me for quite a while, until I realised that Prism is doing exactly as it should - letting us get at the values inside a sum type without changing it’s structure.

Therefore we can change one DogName for another…

newDogName :: dogFact
newDogName = set dogNamePrism "Excellent Bruce" (DogName "Steve")
-- newDogName == DogName "Excellent Bruce"

…but not change the name of DogAge.

noNewDogName :: dogFact
noNewDogName = set dogNamePrism "Good Old Nigel" (DogAge 400)
-- noNewDogName == DogAge 400

over

As well as inheriting set from lens the prism also has over, that lets us map a function over nested value.

stillQuiteOldDog :: DogFact
stillQuiteOldDog = over dogAgePrism (-1) oldDog
-- stillQuiteOldDog == DogAge 99

When you think about how mapping a function doesn’t change the structure around the value (hello, functor) then the behaviour of set that initially confused me so much seems a lot more reasonable. The over function just lets us muddle around with whatever is inside our chosen sum type, should it be there to muddle around with. As such. Clear as mud, right?

Composition

Ok. So like all these examples, the one above is quite simple so that you can see what’s going on, but like all abstractions, it can leave us thinking “thanks pal, but this all seems a little bit much like hard work, surely”. But what makes it all worthwhile is when we combine a Prism with other optics to make a giant super-optic. Remember our example from part one?

appData :: AppConfig
appData = AppConfig {
    count = Right 100
  , title = "Hello"
  , dbConfig = DbConfig {
      ipAddress = "127.0.0.1"
    , thePort = 8080
  }
}

What if we wanted to change what’s inside count? That would be nice, wouldn’t it.

First, let’s make a prism for count.

countIntPrism :: Prism' (Either Error Int) Int
countIntPrism = prism' Right (\e -> case e of
                               Right b -> Just b
                               _       -> Nothing)

…and a lens for getting a count out of the main appConfig…

countLens :: Lens' AppConfig (Either String Int)
countLens = lens count (\app newVal -> app { count = newVal } )

…and then we can compose them together to make a new thing.

fullCountInt :: Traversal' AppConfig Int
fullCountInt = countLens . countIntPrism

Let’s use it to grab that count value…

initialCount :: Maybe Int
initialCount = preview fullCountInt appData
-- initialCount == Just 100

Great job!

And we can use it to change things too! With set!

changedCount :: appConfig
changedCount = set fullCountInt 1000 appData
-- changedCount = AppConfig
--  { value = Right 1000
--  , title = "Hello!!!"
--  , dbConfig = DbConfig
--    { ipAddress = "127.0.0.1"
--    , thePort = 8080
--    }
--  }

And over!

incrementedCount :: appConfig
incrementedCount = set fullCountInt (+1) appData
-- incrementedCount = AppConfig
--  { value = Right 101
--  , title = "Hello!!!"
--  , dbConfig = DbConfig
--    { ipAddress = "127.0.0.1"
--    , thePort = 8080
--    }
--  }

All our friends are here!

You might notice the new type Traversal that has been produced by combining a Lens and a Prism. That’s an interesting thing in itself, but we’ll come to that another time.

That’s quite enough.

Make sense? If not, why not get in touch?

Further reading:

Lens by example - Prisms