Some Intuition on Lenses

I’ve been working on a small project in Haskell recently that uses the wreq library. It’s an HTTP client library that exposes most of its functionality through lenses. Using this library is my first time really using lenses pervasively, so I’ve spent some time trying to understand how lenses really work.

Lenses try to bring the concept of getters and setters into a functional setting. Here, “functional” means that lenses prioritize composition (chaining one lens after another) and immutability (returning a new data structureIt’s common to think that “immutable” means “copy the entire thing” and then change the parts you care about. But if you start with all data being immutable, then you only need to allocate new memory for the subcomponents of your data structure that actually changed. Everything else can be shared by the old and the new.

 instead of mutating the old one in place).

In a functional setting, if we have a type s and we want to get some field of type a from it, a getter is just a function s -> a.

Similarly, a setter that updates that field has the type s -> a -> s which takes the old s and slots the a into it, giving us back a new s.

Let’s see if we can build up some intuition, starting with these types and ending with the type of Lens' from the lens library:

type Lens' s a = forall f. Functor f => (a -> f a) -> (s -> f s)

In particular, let’s start with our getter:

fn :: s -> a

The first thing we can do is convert it to continuation-passing style (CPS). In CPS form, a function throws it’s return value to a user-specified callback function (or continuation) instead of returning its value directly. So our s -> a becomes:

fn :: (a -> r) -> s -> r

After we’re done computing an a from the s we were given, we throw it to the continuation of type a -> r. We then take that result and return it. I like to put parens around the second function:

fn :: (a -> r) -> (s -> r)

But it’s kind of hard to do anything with this, because r is completely arbitrary. It’s chosen by whoever calls us, so we have no information about what can be done on an r. What if we instead require that the continuation result be a Functor?

fn :: Functor f => (a -> f r) -> (s -> f r)

And while we’re at it, it was kind an arbitrary stipulation that the f r of the continuation’s callback be the same as the f r of our function’s result type, so let’s relax that:

fn :: Functor f => (a -> f b) -> (s -> f t)

This relaxation makes sense as long as we know of some function with type b -> t, because then we could

In general, we might not know of some b -> t function. But remember that we do have our s -> a -> s function! So if we choose b = a and s = t, then we get:

fn :: Functor f => (a -> f a) -> (s -> f s)

With a function like this, we can

And we’ve arrived at the type of Lens'! What really happened here was we marked the interestingIn the same way that glass lenses focus light on a point, functional lenses focus a data structure on a point! Isn’t it neat how that name works out? It’s certainly a cooler name than “generalized getter/setter wombo combo” (video, language warning).

 part of our data structure with a Functor. So if we choose an interesting Functor instance, it’ll act on that point.

What if the Functor we choose is Const a? Well, then it’s on us to provide an a -> f a continuation. Since we’ve chosen f = Const a we have to come up with a function with type a -> Const a a. This is a special case of the Const constructor:

Const :: forall b. a -> Const a b

So our continuation remembers the a it was given. After the last step, we’ll have a Const a s, which we can call getConst on to give us the a we stashed. So by choosing Const, our lens acts like a getter!

What if the Functor we choose is Identity? Now we have to provide a function a -> Identity a. At this point, you probably guessed this makes our lens a setter. If we’re trying to use a setter, then we’ll also have access to some new y :: a that we want to use to slot into our s. Let’s see what happens if we make this our continuation:

inj :: a -> Identity a
inj x = Identity y

The x :: a is the old value of x. By dropping x on the floor and returning y instead, we’ve slotted y into our s. Remember that above we took the f a and our setter s -> a -> s, partially applied it to get a -> s, and fmap’d this over the f a. Since our continuation now holds a wrapped up y :: a, we’ll reconstruct a new s using y. Great!

More Resources

These are some resources that helped make lenses less intimidating for me:

Lenses seem intimidating at first, but in the end they’re just a really cool uses of functions. We use nothing more exotic here than the Functor type class and a couple of Functor instances, and in return we get such concise code!