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

What are functors and monads?

In the previous chapter, we discussed the concept of function purity. A function should not produce any side effects and should be idempotent. In this chapter, we have seen how structs can be made immutable, and how this ties into function purity. As mentioned earlier, even in a purely functional language, in which side effects are eliminated as much as possible, you still have desirable side effect behavior. For example, getting input from a user, or writing data to a database, are both side effects that add value to a program.

In this section, we will try to build an understanding of how pure functional languages can achieve this. We’ll also look at an implementation in Go to achieve the same results, building on top of our knowledge about immutable structs and pure functions.

To preface this section, it is commonly said that there are too many monad explanations already and all of them are wrong or lacking in some manner. There are many...