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

Lenses

Data access in nested data types is one of the most common and mundane activities in real-world programs. In imperative and object-oriented programming languages, reaching deep inside nested objects or records is relatively frictionless. This is not the case in Haskell. Because data structures are immutable, updating a field means rebuilding the data structure around the new value for that field. This is especially painful when the field appears deeply nested inside the structure.

The concept of lenses was developed to remedy this problem. In its basic form, a lens is a data accessor that can be used to both inspect and modify the value of a field in a data structure. Unlike the typical data accessors built into programming languages, lenses are first-class: they can be composed, passed around, and used on different instances of the same data structure. Of course, this wouldn’t be Haskell if we didn’t take the idea to the next level. Indeed, lenses can perform...