Book Image

Functional Kotlin

Book Image

Functional Kotlin

Overview of this book

Functional programming makes your application faster, improves performance, and increases your productivity. Kotlin supports many of the popular and advanced functional features of functional languages. This book will cover the A-Z of functional programming in Kotlin. This book bridges the language gap for Kotlin developers by showing you how to create and consume functional constructs in Kotlin. We also bridge the domain gap by showing how functional constructs can be applied in business scenarios. We’ll take you through lambdas, pattern matching, immutability, and help you develop a deep understanding of the concepts and practices of functional programming. If you want learn to address problems using Recursion, Koltin has support for it as well. You’ll also learn how to use the funKtionale library to perform currying and lazy programming and more. Finally, you’ll learn functional design patterns and techniques that will make you a better programmer.By the end of the book, you will be more confident in your functional programming skills and will be able to apply them while programming in Kotlin.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Collections versus Streams


Reading up till here, you're probably thinking that all operations we performed in that program is possible with Collections itself in Kotlin, so why should we use Streams? To answer that, we should first learn the differences between Streams and Collections. So, let's have a look at the following list consisting of differences between Collections and Streams:

  • As the definition of Collections says, a Collection is a data structure which stores and lets you work with a group of data. Streams, on the other hand, aren't data structures and don't store anything; they work like a pipeline or IO channel, which fetches data from its source on demand.
  • Every data structure must have a finite size limit, and the same applies to Collections as well. But, as Streams are not data structures, they don't need to have any specific size limit.
  • While accessing elements of a Collection directly, you can do it any time, even for the same position, without the requirement of recreating...