Book Image

Soar with Haskell

By : Tom Schrijvers
Book Image

Soar with Haskell

By: Tom Schrijvers

Overview of this book

With software systems reaching new levels of complexity and programmers aiming for the highest productivity levels, software developers and language designers are turning toward functional programming because of its powerful and mature abstraction mechanisms. This book will help you tap into this approach with Haskell, the programming language that has been leading the way in pure functional programming for over three decades. The book begins by helping you get to grips with basic functions and algebraic datatypes, and gradually adds abstraction mechanisms and other powerful language features. Next, you’ll explore recursion, formulate higher-order functions as reusable templates, and get the job done with laziness. As you advance, you’ll learn how Haskell reconciliates its purity with the practical need for side effects and comes out stronger with a rich hierarchy of abstractions, such as functors, applicative functors, and monads. Finally, you’ll understand how all these elements are combined in the design and implementation of custom domain-specific languages for tackling practical problems such as parsing, as well as the revolutionary functional technique of property-based testing. By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered the key concepts of functional programming and be able to develop idiomatic Haskell solutions.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:Basic Functional Programming
6
Part 2: Haskell-Specific Features
11
Part 3: Functional Design Patterns
16
Part 4: Practical Programming

Monoids and Foldables

In this and the coming chapters, we change gear from Haskell language features to Haskell programming/design patterns. These patterns are ways of structuring commonly occurring programming problems or situations and communicating about them to other Haskell programmers. Although they show some similarities with the classical object-oriented (OO) design patterns that were introduced by the Gang of Four (GoF), there are many differences as well.

Firstly, while OO programming (OOP) design patterns were devised by software engineers for software engineers, Haskell’s patterns are essentially concepts drawn from the mathematical fields of abstract algebra and category theory repurposed for (functional) programming. Besides being an astounding use of abstract mathematics in otherwise non-mathematical day-to-day programming, this has a number of consequences:

  • OOP design patterns came about in a somewhat ad hoc fashion in the last 30-35 years. In contrast...