Book Image

Learning Functional Programming in Go

By : Lex Sheehan
Book Image

Learning Functional Programming in Go

By: Lex Sheehan

Overview of this book

Lex Sheehan begins slowly, using easy-to-understand illustrations and working Go code to teach core functional programming (FP) principles such as referential transparency, laziness, recursion, currying, and chaining continuations. This book is a tutorial for programmers looking to learn FP and apply it to write better code. Lex guides readers from basic techniques to advanced topics in a logical, concise, and clear progression. The book is divided into four modules. The first module explains the functional style of programming: pure functional programming, manipulating collections, and using higher-order functions. In the second module, you will learn design patterns that you can use to build FP-style applications. In the next module, you will learn FP techniques that you can use to improve your API signatures, increase performance, and build better cloud-native applications. The last module covers Category Theory, Functors, Monoids, Monads, Type classes and Generics. By the end of the book, you will be adept at building applications the FP way.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Historical Events in Functional Programming


The history of functional programming is nothing short of fascinating. Functional programming languages are based on an elegant yet simple mathematical foundation, Lambda calculus.

"To understand a science, it is necessary to know its history."                                                                                               - Auguste Comte

Let's look at the discoveries that led up to Lambda calculus.

George Boole (1815 - 1864)

Logic came from ancient Greeks such as Aristotle and Euclid. Prior to Boole, logic was literally in Greek; it was expressed in the form of language. Boole was the first to translate logic into algebraic symbols:

  • true = 1
  • false = 0
  • and = product (AxB)
  • or = sum(A+B)

Augustus De Morgan (1806 - 1871)

De Morgan's Law stated that all logical operations can be expressed in terms of and, or, and not. Furthermore, all logical operations can also be expressed in terms of just and and not, or just or and not:

a ∧ b = ¬ ( (¬ a) ∨ ...