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

Solve lack of generics with metaprogramming


Metaprogramming (MP) is about writing code that writes code. In MP, we write programs that treat programs, even themselves, as input data. Our MP will read, analyze, transform, and generate code.

Maybe we can use MP to fix what's missing in Go due to its lack of support for generics?

Maybe. First, let's get a better understanding of what MP is about.

Here are some examples:

  • Lexers, parsers, interpreters, and compilers
  • Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs)
  • Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP)
  • Attributes (.NET)
  • Annotations (Java)
  • Generics (.NET, Java)
  • Templates (C++)
  • Macros (C)
  • method_missing (Ruby)
  • Reflection (Go, C#, Ruby)

There are several types of MP.

Programs that support the eval function can generate new code by concatenating strings that represent executable commands. Note: this can pose security risks and is generally not a best practice.

Some languages, such as LISP, can change their own application code based on state information, which provides the flexibility...