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

Domain-Specific Languages

As software developers, languages are one of the most fundamental and powerful tools at our disposal. When we say languages, we likely think of general-purpose programming languages (GPLs) such as Haskell, Python, and Java. While these GPLs differ in many ways, they have all been designed to tackle a wide range of tasks well, but not to excel at any one particular task. In other words, they are jacks of all trades, but masters of none. This is useful when we don’t know in advance what tasks we will face or when we are facing a wide range of different tasks. However, when the tasks we are facing are highly similar and drawn from the same problem domain, GPLs are not optimal. Indeed, we may end up repeating a lot of scaffolding code across tasks and be unnecessarily distracted from the task at hand.

This is where domain-specific languages (DSLs) come in. A DSL is a language that has been designed to excel at a particular kind of task, or a range of...