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

Recursion

In this chapter, we are going to talk about recursion. This is a topic that all programmers encounter sooner or later, as it’s not exclusive to the functional paradigm. Any language in which you can express function calls allows you to express functions that are recursive in nature. For many, it is not a topic that is difficult to understand at first. In functional programming languages such as Haskell, recursion takes center stage.

As such, this chapter is dedicated to understanding exactly how recursion works, including what the performance implications are of doing so, and what the limits of recursion are in Go. We’ll also take a look at some handy constructs for dealing with recursion using functions as first-class citizens.

In this chapter, we will cover these main topics:

  • What recursion means
  • Why use recursive functions?
  • When and how to use recursive functions
  • Leveraging functions as first-class citizens to write recursive functions...