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

Another time of reflection


Are we frustrated yet? We learned how to code in a concise, declarative functional programming style only to learn that it would probably run too slow to be viable in production. We tried various techniques to speed it up, but nothing we've done thus far with pure functional programming can match the performance of old-school imperative programming.

Our goal is to find a way to program using the declarative functional programming style in Go with performance numbers that meet or exceed expectations.

Go is awesome

Go is our favorite language for many reasons including:

  • Performance
  • Fast and easy deployment
  • Cross-platform support
  • Protected source code
  • Concurrent processing

Go is awesome, but

Since Go was not designed to be a pure functional language and lacks generics, we must take a performance hit to force Go into a functional style of programming, right? (Keep the faith! There's hope around the corner.)

We have covered the core principles of implementing and using collections...