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

Programming language categories


Here, we can see four categories of programming languages. The two big categories are imperative and declarative. When programming in a declarative language, we tell the computer what we want. For example, in the following declarative code, we tell the computer that we want to find a Highlander car.

A declarative example

The following is an  example of declarative programming language:

car, err := myCars.Find("Highlander")

Contrast that with an imperative language with all code ceremony where we must construct a for loop.

An imperative example

The following is an example of an imperative programming language:

func (cars *Cars) Find(model string) (*Car, error) {
  for _, car := range *cars {
     if car.Model == model {
        return &car, nil
     }
  }
  return nil, errors.New("car not found")
}

An OOP example

Object-oriented programs (OOP) consists of stateful objects that support object-related operations, called methods, whose implementation and internal structure...