maryamyriameliamurphies.js | style morphisms ported to ES2015 JavaScript using Babel | Functional Programming library

maryamyriameliamurphies.js is a JavaScript library typically used in Programming Style, Functional Programming applications. maryamyriameliamurphies.js has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities and it has low support. However maryamyriameliamurphies.js has a Non-SPDX License. You can install using 'npm i maryamyriameliamurphies' or download it from GitHub, npm.

Since the average explanation of functional programming terminology makes about as much sense to the average reader as the average page of Finnegans Wake, I gave this library a whimsical, literary name. Also, I'm an English literature Ph.D. student, and functional code strikes me as poetic (as "composed" in multiple senses) even though the technical explanations are impenetrably obtuse. All you need to know—in fact, all I understand—is that a pure function (or a morphism in general) simply describes how one thing can predictably transform into another. So a functional program, much like Joyce's final work, is an extended description of how things change. These functions are experimental, as Haskell's type system translates only awkwardly to a JavaScript idiom, but I'd be delighted if any of them turn out to be useful. I tried hard to make them as pure as possible, which is why most (but not all) of them accept as arguments and return as values single values, and very few are defined as methods on prototypes. I also followed Haskell code patterns as closely as I could for each implementation (as much as it made sense to do so), resulting in a style that is sometimes extremely straightforward and sometimes bewilderingly terse. There are two Haskell concepts that I use in the code that do not perfectly fit into the JavaScript way of doing things: the type class and the data type. In Haskell, a type class is similar to a protocol or trait in other programming languages. It describes an interface that objects conforming to it must implement. A type class is a way of making fully parameterized types more useful by placing constraints on them. For example, the Eq type class in this library provides functionality for comparing whether the objects that implement it are equal. Objects that provide their own isEq() function will perform this test and return a boolean. Note that Haskell type classes are in no way comparable to "classes" in OOP. A data type, on the other hand, is much closer to an OO class definition, as it does describe a custom type. The Tuple type is an example of a data type, as it represents a container for other, more basic values. As is often the case with objects in classical languages, instances of Haskell data types are created with special constructor functions that initialize them based on the arguments to those functions. A data type does not inherit (in the usual way) from other data types, however. Instead, it describes how constructor functions convert values passed in as arguments to those functions into the values that comprise that particular type. As mentioned above, data types can be constrained (or not) by type classes, so as to provide additional functionality—Eq is an example of this, as is Ord, a type class that allows objects to be compared (greater than, less than, etc.). Tuple implements both of these type classes, as one may rightly want to compare tuples or test them for equality, for example. Since JavaScript is not a strongly typed language by nature, it seemed unnecessary to me (and, for better or worse, antithetical to the JS spirit) to recreate the entirety of Haskell's static type system, though I do provide a limited amount of type checking. Anyone interested in better type safety should probably be using something like PureScript or GHCJS. Instead, I use the new ES2015 class pattern for data types with static methods defined on those classes to provide the functionality of type classes. Since the classes and their constructors are not exposed in the API this library provides, instances of data types must be created using specialized functions provided for this purpose. This keeps the static "type class" methods private and affords some degree of namespace protection for the data types. ES2015 specifies tail call optimization, which will ensure that all the nifty Haskell-esque recursions this library uses won't blow up your call stack (when it's actually implemented).