list-transformer - A beginner-friendly ListT

Currently, Hackage has four implementations of "ListT-done-right" that I'm aware of:

• LogicT
• pipes (which provides a ListT type)
• list-t
• List

However, I felt that all of these libraries were more complex than they needed to be so I tried to distill them down to the simplest library possible. I want to encourage more people to use ListT so I'm releasing the beginner-friendly list-transformer library .

There are a few design choices I made to improve the new user experience for this library:

First, the ListT data type is not abstract and users are encouraged to use constructors to both assemble and pattern match on ListT values. This helps them build an intuition for how ListT works under the hood since the type is small and not difficult to use directly:

newtype ListT m a = ListT { next :: m (Step m a) }

data Step m a = Cons a (ListT m a) | Nil

Second, the API is tiny in order to steer users towards leaning on Haskell's "collections API" as much as possible. Specifically, I try to direct people towards these type classes:

• Functor/Applicative/Monad
• Alternative/MonadPlus
• MonadTrans/MonadIO

Right now there are only three functions in the API that are not class methods:

• runListT
• fold
• foldM

Everything else is a method for one of the standard type classes and I avoid introducing new type classes.

Third, the API does not provide convenient helper functions for fully materializing the list. In other words, there is no utility function of this type:

toList :: ListT m a -> m [a]

A determined user can still force the list either indirectly via the fold function or by manually recursing over the ListT type. The goal is not to forbid this behavior, but rather to gently encourage people to preserve streaming. The API promotes the intuition that you're supposed to transform and consume results one-by-one instead of in large batches.

Fourth, the library comes with a long inline tutorial which is longer than the actual code. I think the tutorial could still use some improvement so if you would like to contribute to improve the tutorial please do!

Conclusion

You can find the list-transformer library either on Hackage or on Github.

Hopefully this encourages more people to give ListT a try and provides a stepping stone for understanding more complex streaming abstractoins.