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VAL- A value-oriented algorithmic language preliminary reference manual. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., and McGraw-Hill New York.
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Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Programming Methodology Group, Chalmers University of Technology. An efficiency comparison of some representations of purely functional arrays.
#Functional programming series#
Post 2 of 4 in series "functional-programming". You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn. If you like this article, please leave a like or a comment. If you have any question or if you think I missed something please add a comment. In fact, we all should be using the best of everything. It can co-exist perfectly well with imperative and object-oriented programming styles. As I said earlier functional programming is not a silver bullet but it offers a lot of useful techniques for more understandable, maintainable and testable code. There are a lot more that can be done in Go and with the addition of generics in the next major version, this should be even easier. This is just an introduction for those who are trying to apply some functional programming techniques in Go. Hence maps are better than arrays or hash sets in functional programming as data stores. When using functional programming techniques it is encouraged to use functional data types such as Stacks, Maps and Queues. We cannot rely on this when passed parameters are maps or slices. this is a higher-order-function that returns a function func add ( x int ) func ( y int ) int Go supports this and hence makes concepts like closures, currying, and higher-order-functions easy to write.Ī function can be considered as a higher-order-function only if it takes one or more functions as parameters or if it returns another function as a result. First-class and higher-order functionsįirst-class functions(function as a first-class citizen) means you can assign functions to variables, pass a function as an argument to another function or return a function from another. Golang is a multi-paradigm language so let us see how we can apply some of the functional programming concepts above in Go. And that is exactly what we are going to see. The benefits of functional programming can be utilized whenever possible regardless of the paradigm or language you use. Using functional programming doesn’t mean its all or nothing, you can always use functional programming concepts to complement Object-oriented or imperative concepts in Go. Such functions always produce the same result for the same arguments.Īpart from these there are functional programming concepts below that can be applied in Go, we will touch upon these further down. A function should return values only based on the arguments passed and should not affect(side-effect) or depend on global state.
#Functional programming code#
Pure functions only: Functional code is idempotent.This means programs are easier to understand. I.e, A function should only return a value to the invoker and should not affect any external state. No side effects: A function or operation should not change any state outside of its functional scope.In functional programming state is not eliminated, instead, its made visible and explicit No implicit state: Hidden/Implicit state should be avoided.No Data mutations: It means a data object should not be changed after it is created.Hence in functional programming, there are two very important rules I’m also not gonna discuss the pros and cons of functional programming in general.įunctional programming is a programming paradigm-a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs-that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing-state and mutable data. I’m not gonna dive into all functional programming concepts in detail, instead, I’m gonna focus on things that you can do in Go which are in line with functional programming concepts.
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