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

Chapter 9. Functors, Monoids, and Generics

"Here's my attempt at functional programming in Go. I think it's a good idea, but I'm really not sure."

I have seen comments like this on over a dozen blog articles. I hope that after reading this chapter and working through the examples, you'll have a new-found love for functional programming (FP). Not because it's so pure that you worry that side-effect programming will send you to hell, but rather, because you feel comfortable with concepts that form the basis of pure FP and you see that its benefits outweigh the costs of learning how to use it.

Our goals in this chapter are as follows:

  • Appreciate how the lack of generics support in Go can be a good thing
  • Learn how to use a generics code generation tool to solve the boilerplate problem
  • Deeply understand how function composition works
  • Build a few functors and understand how to map between worlds
  • Build a few monoids and learn how to write your own reduce functions