Book Image

F# 4.0 Design Patterns

By : Gene Belitski
Book Image

F# 4.0 Design Patterns

By: Gene Belitski

Overview of this book

Following design patterns is a well-known approach to writing better programs that captures and reuses high-level abstractions that are common in many applications. This book will encourage you to develop an idiomatic F# coding skillset by fully embracing the functional-first F# paradigm. It will also help you harness this powerful instrument to write succinct, bug-free, and cross-platform code. F# 4.0 Design Patterns will start off by helping you develop a functional way of thinking. We will show you how beneficial the functional-first paradigm is and how to use it to get the optimum results. The book will help you acquire the practical knowledge of the main functional design patterns, the relationship of which with the traditional Gang of Four set is not straightforward. We will take you through pattern matching, immutable data types, and sequences in F#. We will also uncover advanced functional patterns, look at polymorphic functions, typical data crunching techniques, adjusting code through augmentation, and generalization. Lastly, we will take a look at the advanced techniques to equip you with everything you need to write flawless code.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
F# 4.0 Design Patterns
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Generalization over specialization


Another outstanding feature of the functional paradigm is generalization. By this, I mean preferring a general solution over a concrete one, when a concrete problem can be solved by applying a general solution that is accordingly parameterized. Let's turn to our sample problem for evidence of generalization. Adjusting the functional solution to a different length of digit sequences (for example, 8 instead of 5), another math operation on the group (for example, the sum instead of the product), another aggregation property (for example, minimum instead of maximum) are mere changes of parameter values for the correspondent functions. A comparison of how much the code changes will be required in case of the other approaches, which I leave for you as an exercise.