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

Functions in Kotlin


Functions are one of the most important parts of programming. We write tons of functions every week for our projects. Functions are also a part of the fundamentals of programming. To learn functional programming, we must have our concepts clear with regard to functions. In this section, we will cover the basics of functions, in order to get you brushed up and ready for the next sections in this chapter, where we will be discussing abstract functional concepts and their implementation in Kotlin.

So, let's start by defining functions.

Note

A function is a block of organized, reusable code that is used to perform a single, related action.

Not very clear? We will explain, but first, let's learn why we should write functions. In short, what is the functionality of a function? Have a look:

  • Functions allow us to break the program into a bunch of steps and substeps
  • Functions encourages code reuse
  • Functions, if used properly, help us keep the code clean, organized, and easy to understand...