Book Image

F# 4.0 Design Patterns

By : Gene Belitski
Book Image

F# 4.0 Design Patterns

By: Gene Belitski

Overview of this book

Following design patterns is a well-known approach to writing better programs that captures and reuses high-level abstractions that are common in many applications. This book will encourage you to develop an idiomatic F# coding skillset by fully embracing the functional-first F# paradigm. It will also help you harness this powerful instrument to write succinct, bug-free, and cross-platform code. F# 4.0 Design Patterns will start off by helping you develop a functional way of thinking. We will show you how beneficial the functional-first paradigm is and how to use it to get the optimum results. The book will help you acquire the practical knowledge of the main functional design patterns, the relationship of which with the traditional Gang of Four set is not straightforward. We will take you through pattern matching, immutable data types, and sequences in F#. We will also uncover advanced functional patterns, look at polymorphic functions, typical data crunching techniques, adjusting code through augmentation, and generalization. Lastly, we will take a look at the advanced techniques to equip you with everything you need to write flawless code.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
F# 4.0 Design Patterns
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Thinking in verbs rather than nouns


Considering the process of data transformations in terms of verbs rather than nouns is very typical for a functional approach as functions are intuitively associated in our brains with actions, not objects. You may notice the single data item in the script Ch1_3.fsx, which is hugeNumber. The rest are few library functions combined in a certain manner, which transform the hugeNumber data item into a line of the console output. This manner of function combination allows persons reading this code to completely ignore intermediate results of the data transformations at each point where the operator >> occurs in the expression.

The less obvious corollary of this combination is the opportunity for the F# compiler to perform a so-called fusion or the manner of code optimization by merging together some adjacent data transformation steps. For example, when adjacent steps are fused together, the amount of data traversals may decrease.