Object Oriented Programming in Haskell
Posted on March 8, 2018In object oriented programming an object is a value with a well-defined interface. The internal state of the object is closed to the outside world (encapsulation), but the behaviour of an object can be modified by redefining one or more of the functions in the object’s interface, typically through subclasses (inheritance). The internal state of the object is open to, and can be extended by, such subclasses. This is known as the open/closed principle.
In this blog post we will explain what open recursion is, provide some runnable examples that you can evaluate one step at a time to develop a better intuition for how it works, and show how it can be used to solve the problem above. These results are not new, but we hope that this blog post can serve to make them a bit more accessible to a larger audience. We then discuss how we can extend this approach using lenses to allow “inheritance” to also extend the “state” of the object.