Book Image

Swift Functional Programming - Second Edition

By : Dr. Fatih Nayebi
Book Image

Swift Functional Programming - Second Edition

By: Dr. Fatih Nayebi

Overview of this book

Swift is a multi-paradigm programming language enabling you to tackle different problems in various ways. Understanding each paradigm and knowing when and how to utilize and combine them can lead to a better code base. Functional programming (FP) is an important paradigm that empowers us with declarative development and makes applications more suitable for testing, as well as performant and elegant. This book aims to simplify the FP paradigms, making them easily understandable and usable, by showing you how to solve many of your day-to-day development problems using Swift FP. It starts with the basics of FP, and you will go through all the core concepts of Swift and the building blocks of FP. You will also go through important aspects, such as function composition and currying, custom operator definition, monads, functors, applicative functors,memoization, lenses, algebraic data types, type erasure, functional data structures, functional reactive programming (FRP), and protocol-oriented programming(POP). You will then learn to combine those techniques to develop a fully functional iOS application from scratch
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Chapter 9. Importance of Immutability

In object-oriented and functional programming, immutable objects are objects whose state cannot be changed or altered after they are initiated. Therefore, a mutable object stays the same until the end of its life cycle, when it is de-initialized. In contrast, a mutable object can be altered countless times by other objects after it is initiated.

Immutable objects improve readability and runtime efficiency, and using them simplifies our applications.

This chapter will cover the concept of immutability by discussing the following topics with coding examples:

  • Immutability
  • Benefits of immutability
  • Cases for mutability
  • An example with approach comparisons
    • Side-effects and unintended consequences
    • Testability
  • Copy constructors
  • Lenses