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

Functors, Applicative Functors, and Traversables

This chapter leads us much further into Haskell’s hierarchy of type classes for type constructors: functors, applicative functors, and traversables.

We will introduce the three abstractions in turn as a generalization of particular list-related functionality: mapping, zipping, and mapping with zipping. These list functions provide a good intuition for the mechanics of the generalizations. However, for applicative functors, the notion of effectful computations provides a much better and more important intuition.

Effectful computations are computations that do not only (or necessarily) produce a result. They also do or can do something additional (such as logging, failing, or changing a mutable state) that somehow interacts with the context in which the computation takes place. This is called the (side) effect of the computation.

It is quite paradoxical. On the one hand, Haskell is called a purely functional programming...