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

Summary


Go is designed using good ideas from both FP and OOP world. For example, go borrowed interfaces, duck typing, and composition over inheritance from OOP world and functions as first class citizens from the FP world.

Go is a perfect example of being pragmatic. Go took the better principles from both OOP and FP paradigms, while clearly ignoring many ideas from each. Perhaps, this perfectly balanced design is what makes Go so special? In that way, Go is the perfect ratio of software languages.

Note

See Chapter 11Category Theory That Applies, for a discussion about the golden ration.

In the next chapter, we'll delve more deeply into pure functional programming. We'll see how to leverage category theory and class types to abstract away details in order to glean new insights. We'll look at functors along with slightly stronger and more useful versions of functors called applicative functors. You'll also learn how to bring the world of side-effects under control using Monads and Monoids.