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)

The Actor Model in Practice

In the previous chapter, we started to look at the actors model as one of their concurrency models available in Scala. In Chapter 9, Libraries for Pure Functional Programming, we saw how challenges of asynchronous and multithreaded programming can be solved using IO and the infrastructure it provides. However, this kind of technology is still not widely adopted. In practice, when working with multithreading, concurrency, and asynchrony in Scala, you will need to deal with more robust libraries in real-world situations.

In this chapter, we will look at the following topics:

  • Akka overview
  • Defining, creating, and messaging actors
  • Working with actor systems