objc.io’s Functional Programming In Swift

As you’ve probably noticed us gushing over here and there, objc.io is the highest-quality programming journal in the history of ever for us epicurean iOS-centric types; so when we noticed that the good folk over there have branched out into books,

Functional Programming in Swift

Thinking Functionally: Get to know the functional  programming paradigm
Functional APIs: Designing functional, composable, and type-safe APIs
Purity: Benefits of value types and immutability
Purely Functional Data Structures: Use recursive enums to write simple data structures
Parsing & Evaluating: A functional parsing library and a simple spreadsheet app as example
Map, Filter, Reduce: Higher-order functions and functional manipulation of collections
Optionals: How Swift solves the “missing value” problem, and why that’s a good idea
Enums: Create your own data types with Swift’s enums for clarity and type safety
Generators and Sequences: Understand the machinery underlying Swift’s collection types
Applicative Functors and Monads: Common patterns underlying functional code

we figured the least we could do in thanks was go buy it … especially since the last time we did any real functional programming was a course so way back in the day that it used a pre-1.0 Haskell version. So y’know, a little help here to catch up on the last two and a half decades, probably in order, yes. Besides, we were immensely amused with Messr. Florian’s blog post about floundering around during the writing process.

And our evaluation is, they’ve done an absolutely wonderful job here. If you’re not fluent in functionalese, it gets the GO BUY IT RIGHT NOW rating; and if you are, there’s still enough Swift specificities and useful code right up to the complete spreadsheet implementation mentioned above that we’re completely confident you’ll find it more than worth the read!

UPDATES:

Non-Swift intros: An introduction to functional programming; Functors, Applicatives, And Monads In Pictures

7 Habits For a More Functional Swift

Swift Functional Programming Tutorial; Getting into functional programming with Swift

What is Functional Reactive Programming?; Younger self; Functional Reactive Intuition – Swift edition

Enough About Swift Closures to Choke a Horse; Instance Methods are Curried Functions in Swift; Swift Function Currying; Closure Expressions in Swift; First Class Functions and Delayed Evaluation in Swift; Functions are Just Named Closures; Handling Multiple Closure Parameters; Curry take-out with a side of Image Processing

Introduction to Function Currying in Swift; Function Currying in Swift

Adopting map() & reduce() in Swift; Function Composition in Swift; Swift: The Tao of Mappage; Maps… Wait, They Don’t Love You Like I Love You; Flattenin’ Your Mappenin’; What do map() and flatMap() really do?; map() can be taxing; Reduce all the things

Functor and Monad in Swift; Swift Adventures In Monad Land; Functor and Monad in Swift; Monads in Swift; Paragons Of Perfunctory Programs; Swift Functors, Applicatives, and Monads in Pictures; Three Useful Monads; What The Heck Is A Monad; Let’s talk about Monads; Understand Monads with this One Weird Trick; Functors, Applicatives, and Monads in Plain English

Tail Recursion Explained

Immutable Types with Changing State in Swift; Conveniently Transforming Immutable Types in Swift; Mutating Functions in Swift Structs

Proof in Functions