Plurrrr

Optics make it possible to conveniently access and modify data structures in an immutable, composable way. Thanks to that, they catch lots of attention from the functional programming community. Still, you can have a hard time understanding how they work just by looking at data declarations and type definitions.

In this post, I present a way of encoding optics that is different from usual. This encoding, called existential optics, is easier to understand than the other encodings, since it makes more explicit the structure of each optic. This is not new and is well known in the category theory academic circles. Still, these ideas do not seem to appear in libraries for languages like Haskell, Purescript, or Scala.

The most well-known type of optics are lenses, which were also the first to be analyzed and used. We will use them as our recurring example to compare the several ways we have to encode optics.

For many developers, databases are basically magic. Like Penn & Teller, this blog post is set to break the illusion. Databases are just like any other code, they have algorithms and processes. These algorithms and processes are meant to improve performance, but can cause limitations if they are not expected.

JSON Patch is a format for describing changes to a JSON document. It can be used to avoid sending a whole document when only a part has changed. When used in combination with the HTTP PATCH method, it allows partial updates for HTTP APIs in a standards compliant way.

The patch documents are themselves JSON documents.

JSON Patch is specified in RFC 6902 from the IETF.