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)

Overview of parallelism solutions

If you remember, the Applicative type class gives us an abstraction to define parallel computations. It was set against the Monad class, which is an abstraction to define sequential computational.

In the Type Classes section in Chapter 8, Basic Type Classes and Their Usage, we reasoned that Applicatives are needed to provide you with a primitive to define independent computational. Parallelism can also be modeled by the Applicative. However, it is precisely the idea of independence for motivating force behind this type class.

Parallelism and concurrency require a different approach. They give rise to problems that are not normally encountered in sequential programming, and these problems have their own techniques so that they can be solved in object-oriented programming. However, these techniques are even more error-prone and hard to reason about...