Nicolas Wu
Dr Nicolas Wu is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London. He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, where he also studied as an undergraduate at Brasenose College. His research interests are centred around programming languages, where he has made advances in applications of category theory for giving the semantics of programs and algorithms. In particular, his recent work has been focused on showing the connections between domain specific languages, algebraic effect handlers, and structured recursion schemes.
Talks I've Given
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The Scope of Algebraic Effects
Featuring Nicolas Wu
Effect handlers are a clean way of describing various effects in a principled and modular way. The approach models the syntax and semantic of operations, where syntax is given by a free monad, and the semantics is given by a handler. Traditionally, the operations must be algebraic in that they...
haskell effect-handlers free-monad -
Categories and String Diagrams
Featuring Nicolas Wu
This talk introduces string diagrams as a notation for calculating in category theory. You will learn the diagrams to better understand monads, adjunctions, and finally free monads. All of this, of course, is relevant to the curious Haskell programmer who wants to better understand abstract...
haskell haskell-x monads -
Transformers, Handlers in Disguise
Featuring Nicolas Wu
Effect handlers have recently been proposed as a new means of working with compositional effects, and threaten to replace monad transformers. Their key advantage is a cleaner way of expressing semantics since they are defined in terms of algebras. An often misunderstood aspect is how they compare...
haskell effect-handlers monads monad-transformers functional-programming