Book Image

Learning Functional Programming in Go

By : Lex Sheehan
Book Image

Learning Functional Programming in Go

By: Lex Sheehan

Overview of this book

Lex Sheehan begins slowly, using easy-to-understand illustrations and working Go code to teach core functional programming (FP) principles such as referential transparency, laziness, recursion, currying, and chaining continuations. This book is a tutorial for programmers looking to learn FP and apply it to write better code. Lex guides readers from basic techniques to advanced topics in a logical, concise, and clear progression. The book is divided into four modules. The first module explains the functional style of programming: pure functional programming, manipulating collections, and using higher-order functions. In the second module, you will learn design patterns that you can use to build FP-style applications. In the next module, you will learn FP techniques that you can use to improve your API signatures, increase performance, and build better cloud-native applications. The last module covers Category Theory, Functors, Monoids, Monads, Type classes and Generics. By the end of the book, you will be adept at building applications the FP way.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Y-Combinator


The Y-combinator is one of most beautiful ideas in all of programming. This code demonstrates how amazingly powerful the simple ideas of functional programming are. The Y-Combinator is a higher order function. It accepts a single argument, which is a function that isn't recursive. It returns a copy of the function which is recursive. It requires that our language supports first class functions and that functions be named or anonymous. Go supports all of that.

The Y in Y-Combinator

Ever wonder the Y in the Y-Combinator comes from?

See how A and B and C connect the dots to form the top part of the "y"?

How the Y-Combinator works

The diagram below illustrates how the Y-Combinator works:

The following are the steps to wire up the Y-Combinator:

  1. f(newData) calls Base64ToByes with the base64 encoded text. dString is downcast into a string.
  1. The return func(e error) (Data, error) { statement is executed and returns execution back to the return statement in the Next function. 
  1. At that time, f...