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 philosophy behind side effects. We found out that in the process of solving a business-domain problem, programmers end up in a reality different from the one of their business logic. The way you write the program and the phenomena that happen at runtime constitute a reality of their own. If you ignore it, the latter reality can grow in complexity, and this results in a mental overhead.

Functional programming allows you to address the problem of the second-order reality by providing techniques to reify its phenomena into effect types and define their behavior in the language of data structures and pure functions.

Effect types lessen your mental load because they eliminate the necessity to remember all the phenomena that happen in your program, even outside the scope of the code you may currently be looking at.

Effect types also make...