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 Declarative Programming Style

Declarative programming is tightly connected to functional programming. Modern functional languages prefer to express programs as algebra and not as algorithms. This means that programs in functional languages are combinations of certain primitives with operators. The technique where you express your programs by specifying what to do, but not how to do it, is referred to as declarative programming. We will explore why declarative programming appeared and where it can be used.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Principles of declarative programming
  • Declarative versus imperative collections
  • Declarative programming in other languages