John DeGoes: Beyond Free Monads - λC Winter Retreat 2017

Free monads and free applicatives have proven an incredibly useful tool in repertoire of the functional programmer: they separate concerns, encourage denotational semantics for program specification, allow easy and type-safe mocking of purely functional code, and allow dynamic introspection and optimization.
Despite these benefits, free monads are notoriously constrained: by themselves, they cannot handle parallelism (only sequentiality), and because they provide only a monad, richer structures (such as monads that fail, or monads that support alternation) cannot be expressed without crude hacks that limit composability and expressiveness.
In this session, John A. De Goes shows how the free monad can be deconstructed for its individual features, and then rebuilt using a more powerful technique that enables more extensibility. The resulting structure - no longer technically a "free monad" - allows reification of as few or as many aspects of computation as are necessary to model the problem domain.
After the session, attendees will know how to augment their existing free programs to add parallelism, racing, failure, and other aspects of computation as required by their problem. In addition, through this thorough deconstruction and reconstruction of the free monad, attendees will have a very deep understanding of reified computation and why the free monad has the structure and limitations it does.