George Wilson - The Extended Functor Family

George Wilson explains and provides intuition for advanced functor structures in Haskell, including contravariant functors, bifunctors, and profunctors.

George Wilson's talk at Compose :: Conference in Melbourne, 2016. -- Functors are ubiquitous in modern strongly-typed functional programming. Every Haskell beginner will come across them as one of the first typeclasses introduced. Stronger structures such as Applicative and Monad often steal the spotlight, but there are many structures related to the humble Functor that go unnoticed. The goal of this talk is to show off and give an intuition for some of these other structures: contravariant functors, bifunctors, and profunctors. With some of these making their way into Haskell’s standard library recently, now is a perfect time to be introduced to or brush up on these concepts. Code examples will use Haskell, but these techniques extend to any language with typeclasses or a similar mechanism, such as Scala’s implicits. -- composeconference.org/2016-melbourne/day-one-program/