For decades, the Functor, Monoid, and Foldable type class hierarchies have dominated functional programming. Implemented in libraries like Scalaz and Cats, these type classes have an ancient origin in Haskell, and they have repeatedly proven useful for advanced functional programmers, who use them to maximize code reuse and increase code correctness.

Yet, as these type classes have been copied into Scala and aged, there is a growing awareness of their drawbacks, ranging from being difficult to teach to weird operators that don’t make sense in Scala (ap from Applicative), to overlapping and lawless type classes (Semigroupal), to a complete inability to abstract over data types that possess related structure (such as isomorphic applicatives).

In this presentation, John A. De Goes introduces a new Scala library with a completely different factoring of functional type classes—one which throws literally everything away and starts from a clean slate. In this new factoring, type classes leverage Scala’s strengths…