Monads, lifting, join, and side-effecting actions.

While playing around with querying ElasticSearch I bumped into something that I hadn't really understood explicitly before about monads, nesting, and IO. Rather than blather on, I'm going to share a "literate" ghci session that demonstrates the point. Main editing change I made was to remove duplication in the output from querying the type :t in ghci.

import Network.HTTP
import Control.Monad (join, liftM)

let url = "http://localhost:9200/events/event/_search?q=port:3000&size=1"

Importing the HTTP client library, a simple one based on IO. Also binding the query I want to perform, "find all documents with the field port equal to 3000, return 1 document".

simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= liftM putStrLn . getResponseBody

But that doesn't print anything. It type-checks too! Let's break it down.

λ> :t simpleHTTP (getRequest url)
  :: IO (Network.Stream.Result (Network.HTTP.Response String))

λ> :t simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= getResponseBody
  :: IO String

So we've got an IO action returning a String. IO happens to implement the monad typeclass, so we should be able to >>= (bind) functions against it.

For our purposes, fmap and liftM mean the same thing. Lifting a function to work on data inside the IO monad.

λ> fmap head (simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= getResponseBody)
'{'
λ> liftM head (simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= getResponseBody)
'{'
λ> :t liftM head (simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= getResponseBody)
  :: IO Char

So far, everything about how we expect this stuff lines up with reality, except for that one case where the body of the response doesn't print when we lift putStrLn to operate on the IO String returned by getResponseBody.

On a hunch, I broke out putStrLn into a separate bind (>>=) call, allowing me to eliminate the lifting (liftM).

λ> simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= getResponseBody >>= putStrLn
{"took":11,"timed_out":false ...

The above is the right answer!

This is how you should write your code in real Haskell. Eliminating the unnecessary lifting was what I should've done to begin with.

All of the code that follows this point is just from my wanting to explore the matter further and to try to get the lifted version to work properly for its own sake.

Then on another hunch:

+++ This is bad, but works.
λ> simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= liftM putStrLn . getResponseBody >>= id
{"took":9,"timed_out":false ...

So at this point I felt a little dumb, if you do too, it's okay.

>>= id is just join. As demonstrated with lists:

λ> [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]] >>= id
[1,2,3,4,5,6]

λ> import Control.Monad (join)
λ> join [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]]
[1,2,3,4,5,6]

λ> :t join
join :: Monad m => m (m a) -> m a

Note that in this case, m is [], so m (m a) is [[Int]] in our list example.

[[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]] is [[Int]], [1,2,3,4,5,6] is [Int]

If this seems like a garden path, just bear with me, I'm tying it back to the original misunderstanding earlier.

Let us query some types in our REPL again:

+++ this is the one that didn't work
λ> :t simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= liftM putStrLn . getResponseBody
  :: IO (IO ())

Our mistake was to liftM/fmap putStrLn instead of just binding it separately of getResponseBody. The nested and unevaluated IO (IO ()) action led to the HTTP response not getting printed.

+++ nota bene
λ> :t putStrLn
putStrLn :: String -> IO ()

λ> :t (liftM putStrLn) . getResponseBody
  :: Network.Stream.Result (Network.HTTP.Response String)
     -> IO (IO ())

λ> :t getResponseBody
  :: Network.Stream.Result (Network.HTTP.Response ty) -> IO ty

With the above type signatures in mind:

+++ These two *did* work!

+++ This is good code
λ> :t simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= getResponseBody >>= putStrLn
  :: IO ()

+++ This is bad, but works. Included again to demonstrate a point.
λ> :t simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= liftM putStrLn . getResponseBody >>= id
  :: IO ()

Now for the grand reveal.

+++ this works as well.
λ> join $ simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= liftM putStrLn . getResponseBody
{"took":4,"timed_out":false ...

λ> :t join $ simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= liftM putStrLn . getResponseBody
  :: IO ()

IO (IO ()) is sometimes a sign of a mistake in Haskell code. There are times it's needed, such as is demonstrated in my next blog post. We don't force evaluation of the nested function(s) until we use join to flatten the IO (IO ()) into IO ().

But the code we really want to write is:

simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= getResponseBody >>= putStrLn

Often you just want to bind.

Reminders/type cheat sheet:

λ> :t (>>=)
(>>=) :: Monad m => m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b
λ> :t (join)
(join) :: Monad m => m (m a) -> m a
λ> :t (fmap)
(fmap) :: Functor f => (a -> b) -> f a -> f b
λ> :t (liftM)
(liftM) :: Monad m => (a1 -> r) -> m a1 -> m r

+++ note how this looks a lot like >>= (bind) ?

λ> :t (join .) . fmap
  :: (Monad m, Functor m) => (a1 -> m a) -> m a1 -> m a

+++ or simply flipped around:
  
 λ> :t flip ((join .) . fmap)
  :: (Monad m, Functor m) => m a1 -> (a1 -> m a) -> m a

λ> concat [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]] == join [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]]
True

Reminder: The Monad typeclass in Haskell is only return, bind, and the three laws. A datatype that satisfies the laws with return and bind implemented is a monad. That's all that is required to be a valid typeclass instance of Monad!

See the monad laws here.

Don't let intuition and a vague feeling suffice, keep learning!