Book Image

Swift Functional Programming - Second Edition

By : Dr. Fatih Nayebi
Book Image

Swift Functional Programming - Second Edition

By: Dr. Fatih Nayebi

Overview of this book

Swift is a multi-paradigm programming language enabling you to tackle different problems in various ways. Understanding each paradigm and knowing when and how to utilize and combine them can lead to a better code base. Functional programming (FP) is an important paradigm that empowers us with declarative development and makes applications more suitable for testing, as well as performant and elegant. This book aims to simplify the FP paradigms, making them easily understandable and usable, by showing you how to solve many of your day-to-day development problems using Swift FP. It starts with the basics of FP, and you will go through all the core concepts of Swift and the building blocks of FP. You will also go through important aspects, such as function composition and currying, custom operator definition, monads, functors, applicative functors,memoization, lenses, algebraic data types, type erasure, functional data structures, functional reactive programming (FRP), and protocol-oriented programming(POP). You will then learn to combine those techniques to develop a fully functional iOS application from scratch
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

What is a function?


Object-oriented programming (OOP) looks very natural to most developers as it simulates a real-life situation of classes or, in other words, blueprints and their instances. However, it brings a lot of complexities and problems such as instance and memory management, complex multithreading, and concurrency programming.

Before OOP became mainstream, we were used to developing in procedural languages. In the C programming language, we did not have objects and classes, and we would use structs and function pointers. FP relies mostly on functions, just as procedural languages relied on procedures. We can develop very powerful programs in C without classes; in fact, most operating systems are developed in C. There are other multipurpose programming languages, such as Go by Google. This is not object-oriented and is getting very popular because of its performance and simplicity.

So, are we going to be able to write very complex applications without classes in Swift? We might wonder...