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

Why many Gophers eschew Java


If you like design patterns, use Java, not Go.

Let's think about where this thinking comes from. Java (as well as C++) tends to focus on type hierarchies and type taxonomies.

Take the ObjectRetrievalFailureException class from the Spring Framework for example:

This looks far too complicated and over-abstracted, right?

Unlike Java, Go is designed to be a pragmatic language where we won't get lost in infinite levels of inheritance and type hierarchies.

When we implement a solution in a language that places so much emphasis on a type hierarchy, levels of abstractions, and class inheritance, our code refactorings tend to be much more time-consuming. It's best to get the design right before we begin coding. Leveraging design patterns can save a lot of time when implementing Java solutions.

Inheritance creates a high level of coupling in object-oriented programming. In the preceding example, a change in the DataAccessException class could cause unwanted side effects in every...