Free

Overview

This folder will do 4 things:

• explain what the Free monad is
• explain how it can be used to create a pure abstract syntax tree (AST) and interpret that AST into an impure but useful computation
• explain why one should use Run instead of Free
• explain the limitations of Free/Run.

Free monads are another way to structure the architecture of your program. However, I wouldn't recommend using this particular way of structuring your program. See this folder's "Drawbacks of Free" for some examples.

Moreover, the gist of Free monads is clearly explained by Nate Faubion in his overview of Free and CoFree: Unrolling Free & Cofree (stop at 1:19:23) (Actual YouTube video name is "PS Unscripted - Free from Tree & Halogen VDOM"). If you watch that video, you do not need to read through the "Why Use the Free Monad" folder's content.

The Free approach deals with the "bind forces us to return the same monad type it receives" restriction by using only one monad. Rather than building a large function that is composed of smaller functions that runs once the initial arguments are given to it (i.e. MTL), the Free approach will create an Abstract Sytax Tree (AST) that describes the desired computation in a pure way. This tree is later "interpreted" via a NaturalTransformation into a base monad (i.e. Effect) that runs those computations in an inpure way. In other words, something akin to

type DSL = DomainSpecificLanguage
type AbstractSyntaxTree output = Free DSL output

defineProgram :: AbstractSyntaxTree
defineProgram = -- implementation

runProgram :: AbstractSyntaxTree ~> Effect
runProgram = -- implementation