Book Image

Functional Python Programming - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Functional Python Programming - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

If you’re a Python developer who wants to discover how to take the power of functional programming (FP) and bring it into your own programs, then this book is essential for you, even if you know next to nothing about the paradigm. Starting with a general overview of functional concepts, you’ll explore common functional features such as first-class and higher-order functions, pure functions, and more. You’ll see how these are accomplished in Python 3.6 to give you the core foundations you’ll build upon. After that, you’ll discover common functional optimizations for Python to help your apps reach even higher speeds. You’ll learn FP concepts such as lazy evaluation using Python’s generator functions and expressions. Moving forward, you’ll learn to design and implement decorators to create composite functions. You'll also explore data preparation techniques and data exploration in depth, and see how the Python standard library fits the functional programming model. Finally, to top off your journey into the world of functional Python, you’ll at look at the PyMonad project and some larger examples to put everything into perspective.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we've looked at two ways to support the concurrent processing of multiple pieces of data:

  • The multiprocessing module: Specifically, the Pool class and the various kinds of mappings available to a pool of workers.
  • The concurrent.futures module: Specifically, the ProcessPoolExecutor and ThreadPoolExecutor classes. These classes also support a mapping that will distribute work among workers that are threads or processes.

We've also noted some alternatives that don't seem to fit in well with functional programming. There are numerous other features of the multiprocessing module, but they're not a good fit with functional design. Similarly, the threading and queue modules can be used to build multithreaded applications, but the features aren't a good fit with functional programs.

In the next chapter, we'll look at the operator module. This can be used to simplify some kinds of algorithm. We can use a built-in operator function instead of defining a Lambda form. We'll also...