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

Fun with Sums, Products, Exponents and Types


Here's the sum of cows with tigers and elephants:

Here's a product of cows with tigers and elephants:

Here's the exponents of cows with tigers and elephants:

If we have a getCow method that will return DressedCows and if we have 3 types of DressedCows then if we call getCow then there are 31 possible DressedCows that it can return.

Note that functions with no arguments are Units. A Unit is a singleton type that carries no information. In Chapter 9, Functors, Monoids, and Generics,we'll see how Units are useful when we build a 12-hour clock functor and when writing a reduce function. A Unit is our identity morphism.

Looking at structures algebraically lets us find matching structure.

Once we've identified an isomorphism we have proven ways to optimize for memory usage, performance or data augmentation.

Proving what our code allows us to us it.

Proving what our code isn't prevents errors.

In this way, types are a fundamental part of functional programming...