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

Introduction to delegation


The origin of delegation in programming is from object composition. Object composition is a way to combine simple objects to derive a complex one. Object compositions are a critical building block of many basic data structures, including the tagged union, the linked list, and the binary tree.

To make object composition more reusable (as reusable as inheritance), a new pattern is incorporated—the delegation pattern.

This pattern allows an object to have a helper object, and that helper object is called a delegate. This pattern allows the original object to handle requests by delegating to the delegate helper object.

Though delegation is an object-oriented design pattern, not all languages have implicit support for delegation (such as Java, which doesn't support delegation implicitly). In those cases, you can still use delegation by explicitly passing the original object to the delegate to a method, as an argument/parameter.

But with the language support (such as in...