Book Image

Hands-On Functional Programming with C++

By : Alexandru Bolboaca
Book Image

Hands-On Functional Programming with C++

By: Alexandru Bolboaca

Overview of this book

Functional programming enables you to divide your software into smaller, reusable components that are easy to write, debug, and maintain. Combined with the power of C++, you can develop scalable and functional applications for modern software requirements. This book will help you discover the functional features in C++ 17 and C++ 20 to build enterprise-level applications. Starting with the fundamental building blocks of functional programming and how to use them in C++, you’ll explore functions, currying, and lambdas. As you advance, you’ll learn how to improve cohesion and delve into test-driven development, which will enable you in designing better software. In addition to this, the book covers architectural patterns such as event sourcing to help you get to grips with the importance of immutability for data storage. You’ll even understand how to “think in functions” and implement design patterns in a functional way. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to write faster and cleaner production code in C++ with the help of functional programming.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Functional Building Blocks in C++
7
Section 2: Design with Functions
12
Section 3: Reaping the Benefits of Functional Programming
17
Section 4: The Present and Future of Functional Programming in C++

Improving cohesion using classes

As a young software engineering student, I spent an inordinate amount of time reading about OOP. I was trying to understand how OOP works and why it's so important for modern software development. At that time, most books were mentioning that OOP is about organizing code into classes that have three important properties—encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism.

Almost 20 years later, I realized that this vision of OOP was quite limited. OOP was largely developed at Xerox PARC, the laboratory known for generating an amazing number of high-quality ideas, such as graphical user interfaces, point and click, the mouse, and the spreadsheet, to mention just a few. Alan Kay, one of the OOP originators, drew from his knowledge as a biology major while facing the problem of organizing large code bases in ways that supported the new GUI paradigm...