Conclusions

This chapter has focused on function composition. We've used Angle => Point functions to represent parametric curves, and we have seen that we can build many useful abstractions based on function composition.

Functions are not the only things that compose. Every time we've used the beside, or above methods on Image, for example, we've been composing images. Composition is one of the key ideas in functional programming, and we'll continue to see it throughout the book. These methods are sometimes known as combinators. This isn't a term we'll use much, but you may find it in other literature so it's useful to know what it means.

The methods of composition, or combinators, all have a property known as closure. This means that the input is the same sort of thing as the output. When we combine two Images using above we get back an Image. When we combine two functions using andThen we get back a function.

It isn't necessary for all the parameters of a method to have the same type for a method to be a combinator. For example, strokeColor combiines an Image and a Color to produce an Image. We still consider this a combinator because we're most interested in the Image type, which is both an input and an output of strokeColor. So we could say that strokeColor composes an Image and a Color to produce an Image.