The list of monoids pattern
Hello! Yes, this blog is still alive. In this post, I want to share a small little pattern that I’ve found to have a surprisingly high quality-of-life improvement, and I call it the list of monoids pattern.
The idea is that whenever we have a monoidal value - a type that is an instance of the Monoid type class - we can sometimes produce a more ergonomic API if we change our functions to instead to a list of these monoidal values.
I recently proposed an instance of this pattern to lucid, and it was well received and ultimately merged as part of the new lucid2 package. To motivate this post, I’m going to start by reiterating my proposal.
lucid is a domain specific language for producing HTML documents. In lucid we have the Attribute type which represents a single key-value pairing. When we construct HTML elements, we supply a [Attribute] list. For example,
My motivation came from using the fantastic HTMX library, and wanting to group a common set of attributes that are needed whenever you connect an element with an end-point that serves server-sent events. More specifically, I wanted to “tail” an event stream, automatically scrolling the latest element of the stream into view (using Alpine.js). An example of the attributes are:
