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

What is FP?

Before diving into practical Haskell programming, we give a brief overview of FP, its history, and its applications. If you are eager to get your hands dirty, you may want to forge ahead to the next section, then return here at a later occasion when you are ready to put Haskell into context.

Programming with functions

Functional programming (FP) is one of the main programming paradigms next to imperative programming and object-oriented programming.

Declarative programming

What sets FP apart from the other two is that it is a member of the declarative programming family. Sometimes, the principle of declarative programming is summarized by saying that declarative programs state what should happen, not how it should happen. This means that its programs do not explicitly determine the order in which computation steps are executed; it is up to the language implementation. Haskell particularly stands out among other FP languages because it embraces the declarative...