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)

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about the patterns of advanced functional programming.

First, we looked at Monad Transformers. These are used to construct compound effect types. Given two independent effect types that describe their own side effects, you can stack them one on top of another to get a combined type from them.

After that, we explored the Tagless Final pattern. The main benefit is inversion of control when you can have a single implementation of your business logic run against different effects systems to gain different semantics.

Finally, we learned about a pattern of type-level computations in functional programming. The main benefit of these is that they allow you to impose guarantees on your program encoded in terms of types, and have these guarantees checked at compile-time. This checking can be achieved with the mechanism of type-level computational...