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 7. Functional Parameters

While writing this chapter, my mind wandered back a few years to when I used to program in FoxPro. As I recall, I wrote a lot of functions in FoxPro. The functions I wrote were typically singular in purpose and rarely required more than four parameters. After Microsoft purchased Fox Software, newer versions of FoxPro began to be less functional. The UI builder was becoming more like Visual Basic. Functions began to be replaced by classes. Logic that was once readily accessible became hidden behind buttons and GUI objects. The lines of code increased, testing took more time and development cycles took longer. I felt a lack of productivity and could not adequately explain my feelings. 

"He who does not understand the supreme certainty of mathematics is wallowing in confusion."

- Leonardo Da Vinci

When I discovered Go, it was like paradise regained; A return to simplicity with added benefits of concurrency, networking, great development tools, first class functions...