Type Classes in Java
Why functional programming is still hard in Java
I am a Java and Scala developer and also a fan of functional programming approach and some pure functional programming languages like Erlang, and Haskell. Java 8 was a big step toward functional programming in Java word, by introducing lambda expression, method reference, and some functional APIs and data structures, Java has converted to a hybrid programming language, but there are some important shortcomings for pure functional programming in Java.
In this article, I am going to show how we can implement and use type classes in Java programming language and what are the benefits of this functional concept (or pattern) and also the difficulties in implementing it using Java syntax (in comparison to Haskell and Scala). I have used Java 11 syntax and also Vavr functional library to implement samples and all code snippets are available in this git repository.
What is Type Classes:
Type classes are one of most important functional programming concept that introduced first in Haskell programming language as a new approach to extend existing classes with new functionality, without using object-oriented inheritance concept, and without changing the original classes source code.
