Book Image

Mastering Functional Programming

Book Image

Mastering Functional Programming

Overview of this book

Functional programming is a paradigm specifically designed to deal with the complexity of software development in large projects. It helps developers to keep track of the interdependencies in the code base and changes in its state in runtime. Mastering Functional Programming provides detailed coverage of how to apply the right abstractions to reduce code complexity, so that it is easy to read and understand. Complete with explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, the book begins by covering the basics such as what lambdas are and how to write declarative code with the help of functions. It then moves on to concepts such as pure functions and type classes, the problems they aim to solve, and how to use them in real-world scenarios. You’ll also explore some of the more advanced patterns in the world of functional programming such as monad transformers and Tagless Final. In the concluding chapters, you’ll be introduced to the actor model, which you can implement in modern functional languages, and delve into parallel programming. By the end of the book, you will be able to apply the concepts of functional programming and object-oriented programming (OOP)in order to build robust applications.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

The actor model as a replacement for the traditional model

One of the most popular approaches to dealing with the complexity discussed previously is the actor approach to concurrent programming. If you look at the preceding examples in detail, you will notice one thing about them, that is, global reasoning. Whenever we have several threads that need to communicate in one with another, we are forced to reason about them together. So, we cannot take one thread and reason about it independently from other threads.

As we saw previously, the solution to the deadlock problem was to change the order in which the monitors were taken in the second thread so that the order matched the one in the first thread. Basically, when we are working in the scope of the second thread, we are forced to take into account the operations done in the first thread.

Global reasoning produces mental load...