Your Program Is a Language - Examples

Demo examples given during Your Program Is A Language at ScalaCon Fall 2021.

Examples are written in Scala 3 and Scala 2. Scala 2 examples are found in the examples-scala-2 folder and are identical to Scala 3 where possible except for syntax. Two major differences:

1. Scala 3 allows us to write Union types A | B and this is useful for scenarios of multiple return types across arbitrary lines. This is used heavily in the CRUDStore.scala file for Scala 3 but this code had to be converted to Either in Scala 2.
2. Scala 3 has opaque type modifiers for types that wrap existing types with no runtime overhead. Code using this style was converted to the much more verbose "wrapper class" style for Scala 2. You can see this in TaglessCalculator.scala.

Calculator

Found in examples/calculator

This example shows a kind of DSL that is relatively simple to implement in as both an ADT as well as a "tagless final" style algebra. Both approaches allow for the same code to be written, but they are encoded in slightly different ways.

The ADT approach requires some kind of data structure to work, so we have a compiler for a List[CalculationOp] that runs our sequence of operations. The tagless approach, on the other hand, contains a given interpreter for the State type in Cats. To make this a little easier for end-users, an opaque type is used to hide the implementation details and allow us to write programs in this embedded language without much thought.

For examples, see the tests

CRUDLang

Found in examples/crudlang

This is a more involved example showing the way we can use an embedded DSL solution to model how we want our programs to compose together. Inside, we have one main algebra, CRUDStore, that acts as an interface for storing key/value pairs. We also have two type classes:

• Keyed - Describes data that has an extractable "key" value
• StatusCodeMapping - Describes data that can map directly to an http4s Status

Two ADTs:

• CRUDRequest - Boilerplate ADT for types of requests that could create/read/update/delete from CRUDStore
• CRUDResponse - The counterpart of CRUDRequest and the response type of any action that touches CRUDStore

And one opaque wrapper around Kleisli, called RequestHandler, that allows us to define functions with a type signature Request => F[Response]. We also have some special syntax to convert a RequestHandler with a StatusCodeMapping for its response type into http4s HttpRoutes to plug right into a web server, and a constructor method RequestHandler.crudHandler that creates a RequestHandler specially tailored to handle CRUD requests/responses.

CRUDLang App

Found in examples/crudlang-app.

An application that uses CRUDLang to define a very basic CRUD server for movies. Defines a Movie type as well as a simple Init script that we write using the CRUDStore algebra, plus Applicative so we can sequence operations.

To talk to the server, you can use any REST client or use the post.sh script in this repository along with any properly-formatted JSON as-needed.