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

Chapter 11. Category Theory That Applies

Inkindergarten, we learned how to read time. In advanced math, we learned how to abstract a 12-hour clock and called it a monad.

In elementary school, we learned geometry, logical reasoning, and functions.

In high school, we learned algebra, linear, and quadratic equations. We were so busy going through the motions deep in the minutiae of our problems that we could see no use for any of it.

Note

Check out the learning material used in K-12 education here: https://www.ixl.com/math/kindergarten/match-analog-clocks-and-times.

Fast forward to our day job. To appear smart, we often ask, Will it scale? No matter what it is.

Wondering how reading time and horizontal scaling are related? They are, deeply. We'll find out how in this chapter.

Our goal in this chapter is to do the following:

  • Gain a working understanding of the category theory
  • Appreciate the deep connection between category theory, logic, and type theory
  • Understand what binding, currying and application...