Note: this post assumes you know quite a bit about defunctionalization. If you don’t read this post first.

Note: this is from my drafts. I think I had more to say, but it is sufficiently long since I read the book that I don’t remember what it was. Re-reading it I think it holds up okay so I’m publishing it.

This book changed how I think about women, and about feminism.

De Beavoir’s analysis of the position of women is a clear, historical meterialist one. Women are faced with a cascading series of disadvantages, each of which builds on the previous one, both historically/causally and in the current state.

If you spend enough time in risk-tolerant places (e.g. startups, blockchain) you start to notice a particular pattern. A charismatic founder, call them Alice, starts a new project. The project seems to be transparently stupid or bullshit, but somehow they manage to secure a lot of funding and/or users. After a while, the project fails, probably after providing no value to anyone… but Alice comes out of it well, having cashed out through high salary or selling lots of stock/tokens/whatever.

The Haskell Language Server (HLS) codebase has a lot of CPP conditionals. A lot of them look like this:

#if MIN_VERSION_ghc(9,2,0)

which says that the version of the ghc library has to be at least 9.2; or this

#if MIN_VERSION_ghc(9,2,0) && !MIN_VERSION_ghc(9,3,0)

which says that the version of the ghc library has to be between 9.2 and 9.3; or this

#if __GLASGOW_HASKELL__ < 902

which says that the version of GHC itself has to be less than 9.2.

When we stop supporting a version of GHC, many of these conditonals become obsolete. If we have code like this:

x = 
#if MIN_VERSION_GHC(9,2,0)
  1
#else
  2
#endif

then once we only support GHC 9.2 and above, the conditional will always evaluate to true, and so we can simplify it away. Until now, we’ve mostly done this by hand. But surely there should be a way to do this automatically!

It was good, but I didn’t find myself as blown away as some people seem to have been. I did have some thoughts, so here they are (spoilers!).