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

Partial application

Now that we understand closures, we can start thinking about partial application. The name “partial application” quite explicitly tells us what is happening – it is a function that is partially applied. This is perhaps still a bit cryptic. A partially applied function is taking a function that takes N number of arguments and “fixing” a subset of these arguments. By fixing a subset of the arguments, they become set in stone, while the other input parameters remain flexible.

This is perhaps best shown with an example. Let’s extend the createGreeting function that we built in the previous section of this chapter:

func createGreeting(greeting string) func(string) string {
     return func(name string) string {
          return greeting + name
     }
}

The change we have made here is to have the greeting passed as an input...