On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 3:45 PM, Eli Frey <eli.lee.frey@gmail.com> wrote:

> mconcat :: Monad m => [m] -> m
> mconcat = foldl mappend []

We can think of `mconcat` having a little lookup table inside of itself, and whenever we pass it a concrete `[m]`, `mappend` gets looked up and we get the implementation for `m`.  Typeclasses are just mappings from types to functions

Except not quite... the "Monad m =>" in the signature really means "hey, compiler, pass me the appropriate implementation of Monad so I can figure out what I'm doing with this type m".  It's not a built in table, it's a hidden parameter.

Aside from Object Orientation, it is probably a good idea to learn some C for a bit too.  C is a good language to play in and try and implement more advanced language features.  Once you reallize that objects are just lookup tables of functions bound with a data-structure, you can implement your own in C, or you can make closures as functions bundled with (some) of their arguments, or you can implement interesting datastructures, or so many other fun things.  A good understanding of tagged unions has helped me in many a convo with an OO head.

A perhaps strange suggestion in this vein:  dig up the source code for Xt, the old X11 Toolkit, and the Xaw widget library that is built atop it.  (It's part of the X11 source tree, since most of the basic X11 utilities and xterm are based on it.)  It implements a primitive object system in C.  Gtk+ does the same, but hides much of the implementation behind macros and relies on tricky casting etc. behind the scenes for performance; in Xt, the basic machinery is more easily visible for inspection and much easier to understand even if you're not all that familiar with C.  If you go this way, once you've figured out what Xt is doing you might go on to see the more advanced concepts in how Gtk+ does it.

And once you've done this, you'll have a good idea of what Objective-C and C++ (minus templates) are doing under the covers.  (Mostly C++, since ObjC is more or less Smalltalk's OO on top of X, whereas the core concepts of C++ are not so very different from what Xt does.)  If you really want to dig in further, you might want to try to find the source to cfront, the original C++ implementation which was a preprocessor for the C compiler.  It'll be missing a lot of modern C++ features, but the core is there.

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