Book Image

Mastering Functional Programming

Book Image

Mastering Functional Programming

Overview of this book

Functional programming is a paradigm specifically designed to deal with the complexity of software development in large projects. It helps developers to keep track of the interdependencies in the code base and changes in its state in runtime. Mastering Functional Programming provides detailed coverage of how to apply the right abstractions to reduce code complexity, so that it is easy to read and understand. Complete with explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, the book begins by covering the basics such as what lambdas are and how to write declarative code with the help of functions. It then moves on to concepts such as pure functions and type classes, the problems they aim to solve, and how to use them in real-world scenarios. You’ll also explore some of the more advanced patterns in the world of functional programming such as monad transformers and Tagless Final. In the concluding chapters, you’ll be introduced to the actor model, which you can implement in modern functional languages, and delve into parallel programming. By the end of the book, you will be able to apply the concepts of functional programming and object-oriented programming (OOP)in order to build robust applications.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Tagless Final

Tagless Final is a popular pattern of advanced functional programming that can be used to abstract away capabilities and side effects you do not know ahead of time and cannot predict. As usual, the best way to see how it works and why it is useful is to look at some examples.

Programming to capabilities

Imagine you are writing an application that is to be executed against more than one environment. Such scenarios are common in the real world. A good example is mobile applications. You can have multiple mobile platforms. However, you would like to publish your applications to all of them. The platforms that exist are quite different from each another. And usually, it is pretty tedious to reimplement your application...