2024-02-16: Jules Hedges (MSP)

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 15:05:00 +0000

Jules Hedges (MSP)

Making lenses less pointless

Abstract

This talk contains two ideas. The first is a small trick for programming with lenses in a not-pointfree way, without using macros or other brittle hacks. The key is something I call a "dialectic", which is a value that carries around a delimited continuation with it. The second idea is realising that the central construction of Matteo's "Diegetic Open Games" paper amounts to a monad on the category of lenses that arises as the Kleisli dual of the linear ! comonad in a Dialectica category. By putting these two ideas together we get a shallow DSL for open games, differentiable programming, and other applications of categorical cybernetics. This will be a live coding talk using Haskell, although I think the same ideas should work in any language with first class functions.

2024-02-16 15:00:00 UTC
LT209 and Online