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

Summary

In this chapter, we have explored two basic algebraic structures that occur frequently in functional programs: semigroups and monoids. While these are interesting patterns on their own, they turn out to be particularly useful for aggregating the elements of collections. For that purpose, we have introduced the notion of type constructors, types of higher kinds that allow us to separate the collection type from its element type. Next, we have explored the Foldable constructor type class for collections whose elements can be extracted into a list. Its minimal complete definition based on foldMap turns out to be a Swiss Army knife that can be conveniently instantiated with different monoids to accomplish all manner of aggregation tasks. Finally, we have developed a custom monoid to tackle a new task, checking the sortedness of foldable collections.

Chapter 10, Functors, Applicative Functors, and Traversables, continues with a hierarchy of type classes for type constructors...