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

Characteristics of FP


Let's start by looking at the requirements for a pure FP language. A pure FP language must include support for things like:

  • First-class functions
  • Tail-call optimization (TCO)
  • High-order functions
  • Pure functions
  • Immutable Data

In order to accomplish pure FP, a language must treat functions as it does any other variable type. How can an immutable language have variables that vary? The way we accomplish this in an FP way is by creating new variables, rather than modifying existing ones. We will see how to accomplish this later in the chapter, when we look at the Map function.

Go is a multidimensional language that supports imperative, object-oriented, and FP styles. We could write a purely imperative or functional program in Go. It is our choice of programming style that dictates this. This is one of the great things about Go and FP. It's not an all or nothing issue. We can migrate our code toward FP when and where it makes sense to do so.

Go requires tail-call optimization (TCO...