Overview

Haskell inspired much functional programming in Scala, including the well-known libraries Cats and Scalaz. Yet much of this machinery, which has its roots in category theory, remains confusing to most Scala developers, which limits the ability of developers to use functional libraries and functional abstractions in their applications.

In this course, developers will learn what type classes are, and how to use them, and then systematically explore more than a dozen different standard type classes that appear across many different programming languages, including Scala, Kotlin, and Haskell. By the end of the course, developers will understand which type classes are useful to solve which types of problems, as well as possess the skills necessary to decipher new type classes they haven’t seen before.

Who Should Attend

Scala developers who struggle to understand type classes and functional abstractions like monads, comonads, applicative functors, and the like.

Prerequisites

Good working knowledge of Scala, including familiarity with immutable data, pattern matching, and basic recursion. Developers who have attended Functional Scala Foundations will be well-prepared for this course.

Topics

• A brief introduction to generics & higher-kinded generics
• Type classes & their encoding in Scala
• Implementing type classes for custom data types
• Implementing type classes for custom generic data types
• Standard type classes for ordering, equality, & debugging
• The abstract algebra hierarchy
• The functor hierarchy, including applicative and monad
• Dual abstractions, such as comonads
• Collection type classes, including Traverse and Foldable
• Exotic functors, such as contravariant, invariant, and selectable
• Profunctors and arrows
• Bifunctors
• Higher-order monoids and semigroups