haskell functional programming as a liberal arts

Types such as List, Map, Maybe, Either, State, Reader, Writer, and Zipper adhere to the functional way of thinking and force you to think in a functional way. Haskell comes with a myriad of such data types. To learn functional programming you’d need to learn about some common data types used by functional programmers. You can think of typeclasses as Java interfaces.

Typeclasses declare an interface and types adhering to any typeclasses can be interacted with the interface declared by those typeclasses. Haskell comes with carefully designed built-in typeclasses that correspond to these concepts. Each of these concepts have some useful properties that simplify programs. Typeclasses and Typesįunctional programming makes use of many concepts such as Functors, Applicatives, Monads, etc. See post on Algebraic Data Type to learn more about them. User defined data types in Haskell are Algebraic thus teaching you another core concept of Functional programming well. These are types that are composed of one or more other types and can be decomposed to perform pattern matching.

Compiling Main ( whyhaskell.hs, interpreted )įunctional programming makes heavy use of Algebraic Data Types. g) (x) applies function f to the result of g(x). For example, function composition is written as f. Haskell offers beautiful syntax (that it borrows from mathematics) for fundamental concepts in functional programming. This forces you to learn about dealing with data in a functional style which is a crucial step in your quest to learn functional programming.

Haskell enforces immutability and there’s no way to mutate any data after its declaration. It’s what is called a constant in some languages. That is, once let name = 'fpunfold' has been declared, name can never be set to anything else. Once a value is defined it stays its same self throughout its existence.

You might be aware that we don’t mutate data in functional programming. Let’s go through some of Haskell’s features to see what makes it special. If you want to learn functional programming you should seriously consider learning it through Haskell. It pioneers functional programming and enforces it.

Haskell functional programming as a liberal arts