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)

Use Case - A Parallel Web Crawler

In the previous chapter, we discussed the actors model and a framework that you can use to program with actors. However, the actor model is a paradigm just like functional programming. In principle, if you know the actors model from one language, you can use it in another language even if it doesn't have a framework that supports the actor model. This is because an actor model is an approach to reasoning about parallel computations, not some language-specific set of tools.

This state of things, just like functional programming, has its own benefits and drawbacks. The benefit is that you are not language-dependent if you depend on concepts. Once you know a concept, you can come to any programming language at all, and be capable of using them. However, the learning curve is steep. Precisely because it is all about paradigm and approach, it...