Book Image

Functional Python Programming - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Functional Python Programming - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

If you’re a Python developer who wants to discover how to take the power of functional programming (FP) and bring it into your own programs, then this book is essential for you, even if you know next to nothing about the paradigm. Starting with a general overview of functional concepts, you’ll explore common functional features such as first-class and higher-order functions, pure functions, and more. You’ll see how these are accomplished in Python 3.6 to give you the core foundations you’ll build upon. After that, you’ll discover common functional optimizations for Python to help your apps reach even higher speeds. You’ll learn FP concepts such as lazy evaluation using Python’s generator functions and expressions. Moving forward, you’ll learn to design and implement decorators to create composite functions. You'll also explore data preparation techniques and data exploration in depth, and see how the Python standard library fits the functional programming model. Finally, to top off your journey into the world of functional Python, you’ll at look at the PyMonad project and some larger examples to put everything into perspective.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 12. The Multiprocessing and Threading Modules

When we eliminate a complex, shared state and design around non-strict processing, we can leverage parallelism to improve performance. In this chapter, we'll look at the multiprocessing and multithreading techniques that are available to us. Python library packages become particularly helpful when applied to algorithms that permit lazy evaluation.

The central idea here is to distribute a functional program across several threads within a process or across several processes. If we've created a sensible functional design, we can avoid complex interactions among application components; we have functions that accept argument values and produce results. This is an ideal structure for a process or a thread.

In this chapter, we'll focus on several topics:

  • The general idea of functional programming and concurrency.
  • What concurrency really means when we consider cores, CPUs, and OS-level parallelism. It's important to note that concurrency won't magically...