Library patterns: Multiple levels of abstraction

Over the last few years, I created or contributed to a number of libraries including F# Data for data access, Deedle for exploratory data science with C# and F#, Markdown parser and code-formatter F# Formatting and other fun libraries such as one for composing 3D objects used in my Christmas blog post.

Building libraries is a fun and challenging task - even if we ignore all the additional things that you need to get right such as testing, documentation and building (see my earlier blog post) and focus just on the API design. In this blog post (or perhaps a series), I'll share some of the things I learned when trying to answer the question: What should a good library look like?

I was recently watching Mark Seemann's course A Functional architecture with F#, which is a great material on designing functional applications. But I also realised that not much has been written on designing functional libraries. For some aspect, you can use functional patterns like monads (see Scott Wlaschin's presentation), but this only answers a part of the question - it tells you how to design individual types, but not an entire library...

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