Book Image

Learn Type-Driven Development

By : Yawar Amin, Kamon Ayeva
Book Image

Learn Type-Driven Development

By: Yawar Amin, Kamon Ayeva

Overview of this book

Type-driven development is an approach that uses a static type system to achieve results including safety and efficiency. Types are used to express relationships and other assumptions directly in the code, and these assumptions are enforced by the compiler before the code is run. Learn Type-Driven Development covers how to use these type systems to check the logical consistency of your code. This book begins with the basic idea behind type-driven development. You’ll learn about values (or terms) and how they contrast with types. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll cover how to combine types and values inside modules and build structured types out of simpler ones. You’ll then understand how to express choices or alternatives directly in the type system using variants, polymorphic variants, and generalized algebraic data types. You’ll also get to grips with sum types, build sophisticated data types from generics, and explore functions that express change in the types of values. In the concluding chapters, you’ll cover advanced techniques for code reuse, such as parametric polymorphism and subtyping. By end of this book, you will have learned how to iterate through a type-driven process of solving coding problems using static types, together with dynamic behavior, to obtain more safety and speed.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we built some type-safe code that is also relatively easy to maintain and extend, using Reason's core features. We could go further to have more generic code using advanced techniques, such as functors, but that is not necessary for this small example.

This was the final chapter. We iterated through a type-driven process of solving coding problems. While doing so, we improved our understanding of ReasonML's features and techniques, in particular variant types, functions, modules, and records. We also looked at how to test ReasonML code directly using the Jest framework.

I hope the book was useful as an introduction to the world of ML languages, and that it will help you go further with the ReasonML techniques and tools, and maybe even with React if you are a web developer with additional skills.