Functional Programming in Go
The article highlights functional programming in Go, focusing on map, filter, and reduce operations. It explains first-class functions and provides code examples, promoting their use for elegant and efficient coding.
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The article discusses the concept of functional programming in Go, emphasizing the use of functions as primary control structures rather than just organizing imperative code. It introduces three key operations: map, filter, and reduce, which allow for elegant solutions to various programming problems. The author explains how to implement these operations in Go, starting with the definition of first-class functions, which can be passed as arguments or returned as results. The Map function applies a transformation function to each element of a slice, while the Filter function retains elements based on a specified condition. The Reduce function combines elements of a slice into a single value through a specified operation. The article provides code examples for each operation, demonstrating their utility and conciseness compared to traditional looping methods. The author concludes by encouraging readers to explore these functional programming techniques and their applications in Go, highlighting the potential for more elegant and efficient code.
- Functional programming in Go emphasizes using functions as primary control structures.
- Key operations include map, filter, and reduce, which simplify data manipulation.
- First-class functions in Go can be passed as arguments or returned from other functions.
- The article provides practical code examples for implementing map, filter, and reduce.
- The author encourages exploring functional programming techniques for more elegant code solutions.
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8 comments- Ergonomics weren't the greatest when working with monads such as options and results. I think pattern matching is needed here, but concepts like those go against Go's core design philosophy.
- I suspect there are several cases where runtime performance is an issue, but admittedly did not investigate this.
- Perhaps most importantly, it deviates from the way most people read and write Go, and less importantly, LLMs struggle too.
Because of these reasons, I came to the conclusion that the advantages were not worth the trade-offs.
Perhaps somebody will create a garbage-collected Rust-like language in the future and bridge the gap between the two languages.
I’m a fan of Go and FP and would love to see someone bridge other FP aspects like monads, in a way that feels natural in Go.
For example raku (and perl before it) has very good support with map/grep/closures, etc.
https://rakujourney.wordpress.com/2024/10/12/raku-burritos/
Says…
And let’s end with a quote (sadly I did not record the originator)…
I think i just expressed my thought in a wrong way, haha. I am a functional freak, and the first thing i did was check out Raku’s functional patterns. I was amazed. Raku can be extremely functional, but in my opinion language can be called functional when there’s no other way other than functional for the most part. Raku has great functional support, but the language doesn’t force you into anything, you can do basically anything! A sandbox language, and i am loving it.
anon
Related
An unordered list of things I miss in Go
The blog post highlights features missing in Go, such as ordered maps, default arguments, and improved nullability, suggesting these enhancements could benefit the language despite requiring significant revisions.
A Love Letter to Go
The author reflects on 12 years with Go, praising its simplicity, performance, and concurrency, while suggesting improvements in data structure handling and broader use in data science and machine learning.
Functional PHP (2015)
The author advocates for using functional programming in PHP, highlighting benefits like improved modularity, reduced complexity, easier debugging, and enhanced maintainability through small, single-purpose functions and higher-order functions.
Why you should use Go
The author praises Go for its simplicity, robust standard library, and efficiency in full-stack development, highlighting benefits like single binary deployments and effective concurrency, making it a practical programming choice.
Ranging over Functions in Go 1.23
Go 1.23 introduces ranging over functions, allowing iteration over custom data structures with for-range loops, simplifying iterator creation, supporting early termination, and enhancing code clarity through various examples.