Book Image

Functional Programming in Go

By : Dylan Meeus
Book Image

Functional Programming in Go

By: Dylan Meeus

Overview of this book

While Go is a multi-paradigm language that gives you the option to choose whichever paradigm works best for the particular problem you aim to solve, it supports features that enable you to apply functional principles in your code. In this book, you’ll learn about concepts central to the functional programming paradigm and how and when to apply functional programming techniques in Go. Starting with the basic concepts of functional programming, this Golang book will help you develop a deeper understanding of first-class functions. In the subsequent chapters, you’ll gain a more comprehensive view of the techniques and methods used in functional languages, such as function currying, partial application, and higher-order functions. You’ll then be able to apply functional design patterns for solving common programming challenges and explore how to apply concurrency mechanisms to functional programming. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to improve your code bases by applying functional programming techniques in Go to write cleaner, safer, and bug-free code.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Functional Programming Paradigm Essentials
7
Part 2: Using Functional Programming Techniques
11
Part 3: Design Patterns and Functional Programming Libraries

Higher-Order Functions

In this chapter, we are going to explore the concept of function composition through higher-order functions. There are a variety of new concepts that we are introducing here, such as closures, partial application, and function currying. We will take a look at some practical examples and real-world use cases for these.

First, we will cover the core concepts of composing functions from an abstract viewpoint, and then we will combine the concepts in a practical example. Everything that we will learn here leans heavily on the concepts introduced in Chapter 2, where we learned what it means to treat functions as first-class citizens.

In this chapter, we will cover the following:

  • An introduction to higher-order functions
  • Closures and variable scoping
  • Partial application
  • Function currying, or how to reduce n-ary functions to unary functions
  • Examples: