Generic programming is missing

[anka-213]

What do you mean? Generic programming is a very vague term. Can you give some examples?

[nponeccop]

We can stick to something like this:

Generic programming centers around the idea of abstracting from concrete, efficient algorithms to obtain generic algorithms that can be combined with different data representations to produce a wide variety of useful software.

So how well Haskell supports the generic programming? It does extremely well compared to other languages. How we can substantiate this claim? It's not very easy unfortunately because there are so many facilities in Haskell to support various generic styles.

• Type system - type classes, algebraics, parametric polymorphism
• Template Haskell to generate code at compile time
• Data.Generic, Data.Data, Data.Typable and so on (integrated with compiler)
• dozens of libraries for specific techniques (such as Scrap Your Boilerplate, Datatypes a la carte, Recursion schemes etc)
• dozens of very abstract primitives (start from Typeclassopedia and go on to profunctors, lenses, conduits etc)
• hundreds of unusually abstract algorithms (e.g. abstract breadth first search, abstract structural unification)
• Generics category on Hackage
• etc

So the question is how do we describe all of that concisely, and what is already covered elsewhere?