Introduction
This article is part of the Scala knowledge bits Series.
Periodically, I will publish new exercises so you can slowly build up knowledge about Scala.
It is designed to be done in a very short amount of time and learn a little bit each day, just to create a routine.
This episode will teach you about Scala Functor.
Hope you are going to enjoy it! It is designed for anyone to learn Scala from scratch and slowly learn, one Bit at a time.
After this Bit, I would love to hear your feedback in the comments down below.
Feel free to join the Discord server as well if you would like some help and support from the rest of our community.
What are we learning today?
Today we are going to learn about Scala Functor !
Functional Programming today !
And let’s start by the easiest one: Functor.
Time to try on the exercise on your own and scroll down for more information when you are done or if you are stuck.
Exercise
Here is an exercise to complete today.
If I did my job well, you should be able to guess by yourself the solution based on what you previously learned and based on the clues.
But if you get stuck, scroll down to get more information.
The goal of the exercise is to replace the ??? by a piece of code so that the exercise compiles and that’s how you win! Good luck!
You can fill the exercise right in here:
Or, if it does not load, go on to Scastie (lPfrjWhhQUew9oxzlD0nSw).
More information about Scala Functor
In this exercise you will learn (or have learned, if you have already solved the puzzle) about Scala Functor.
You might have heard about Monad, Monoid, Applicative, etc…
In this episode, we are focusing on the Functor.
The formal definition for a Functor is a transformation from a category A to a category B. Such transformations are often represented by an arrow: A -> B.
This transformation, in Scala, is translated to the method map that we have seen a lot in the past.
A Functor (F), in category theory, must follow several rules:
- All element of
Amust have a result inB - Identity:
-
If we define
id, the identity method:id(a) == a, -
then
id(F) == F.map(id).
-
If we define
- Composition:
-
If we define
fandg, two methods, -
then
F.map(f).map(g) == F.map( g(f(_)) ).
-
If we define
In the following episode, we are going to learn more about the other component of the category theory ecosystem and functional programming overall.
Feel free to go back to the exercise, modify the code to try out new things and get a better intuition for Scala Functor.
Conclusion
I hope you have learned something new or had fun during this Scala Knowledge Bit.
Please ask questions or post feedback in the comments below.
Feel free to try on the next Scala Knowledege Bit.
If you are curious about the previous Scala knowledge Bits, go check it out! 🙂