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

The big reveal


A monad chains continuations.

Recall the monad from the hierarchy diagram of Fantasy Land algebras earlier in this chapter?

We'll talk a lot more about Monads in the last unit of our book, but for now let's take a sneak peak at the big picture.

Earlier we saw composition of functions:

That's actually a problem because that's not a Monoid. A Monoid looks like this:

And that's the big reveal. Monads are purple!

Ha. Gotcha!

Besides the color, what can you see that's different between the monadic function and the ones above it? 

What about the a going in and the a coming out? That means that if a Monoid accepts a parameter of type A (by convention, a lower case a variable is a value of type A), then it will spit out another a value.

Guess what that's called? When our function returns the same type that it's fed? We call that an endomorphism where en means same and morphism means function; So, it changes from an a to an a. Simple.

What about the chain word used in the a monad chains continuations...