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

Monads

This chapter introduces the king of the type constructor hierarchy: the monad. I see two main reasons for the prominent position and importance of monads:

  • The first reason is an objective and pragmatic one—we can write more expressive effectful programs with monads than we can with applicative functors. In particular, the control flow of applicative functor programs is fixed upfront before it is run. Each step in an applicative program produces a result, and these results are combined to form the final result. In contrast, the control flow of monadic programs is more flexible. The result of a monadic step can determine what the next steps to take are. In essence, we have the same flexibility in monadic programs as we do in pure programs.
  • This flexibility makes monads the first abstraction that Haskell programmers reach when writing effectful programs. Even when the same code can be written using either the monad or the applicative function abstraction, monad...