Functional programming

The reason that I kind of split on the OOP thing and the FP thing, where I'm like, I really just think OOP should kind of just go away completely, whereas FP I actually kind of really like, is it's because of what I think it does to a programmer's brain, right? That's actually the part that I care about.

I find myself not only enjoying but being well benefited to thinking about my code in terms of purely functional things from time to time.

It is a good mode for me to think in, right? Like my code benefits from me switching into a functional mindset now and again.

Because I do think, like...

For as much as I would say that I don't agree at all with Stroustrip's language design philosophy of, like, we're not going to have the inspect statement from Simula, for example, which I would have considered, like, the most important thing to have, right? And I think, by the way, like, this is one of the reasons you'll notice, like, I always end up in scrapes with OOP people, right? Like, object-oriented programming people I'm always, like, at, you know, butting heads with.

But I never really butt heads with FP people, right? And why? Because it's like, honestly, my procedural programming style is very close to an FP style, just I don't have an FP...

I don't work in an FP language, so I don't have...

I don't quite go as far as they would go, but it's like, I think there's a lot of value in FP, and I like the concepts from FP, and I kind of use a subset of that myself whenever I'm programming.

But what does that actually mean for the code you're typing every day?

So the text defines three main pillars of functional programming, or FP.

And the first one is immutability.

OK.

In FP, values never change.

Once you define a piece of data in memory, it is locked in for its lifetime.

Wow, OK.

Tabs versus spaces, the eternal war finally settled by the Fsharp compiler.

And today's mission is unpacking a really fascinating book.

It's called Functional Programming in JavaScript by Lewis Atencio.

A great read.

Yeah, it really is.

And the goal today is to demystify functional programming, or FP, as we'll call it, and figure out how it acts as a, well, a shortcut to writing cleaner, less buggy code.

Specifically in JavaScript, which, uh, as anyone who writes it knows, can be a bit of a Wild West.

Oh, absolutely.

So JavaScript has some flaws.