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

Viva La Duck


Our next code example will illustrate several of the SOLID design principles applied to our Go implementation.

In our Viva La Duck application, our duck must visit a number of ponds looking for bugs to eat. To keep things simple, we'll assume that each stroke will require the duck to eat one bug. Each time the duck paddles its feet (one stroke), the duck's supply of strokes is decreased by one.

We're not concerned with how the duck moves from pond to pond, but rather the number of strokes the duck must make to traverse the length of the pond. If a pond has bugs to eat, they will be found on the other side of the pond. If the duck runs out of energy, it dies.

Our program is a self-contained runnable Go source file. Its package name is main and it has a main() function. We'll use the DASHES constant later when we print the statistics indicating what the duck encountered at each pond.

The Pond struct contains the state of each pond, that is, the number of bugs it supplies for the duck...