97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

Chapter 2. Apply Functional Programming Principles

Edward Garson

FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING has recently enjoyed renewed interest from the mainstream programming community. Part of the reason is because emergent properties of the functional paradigm are well positioned to address the challenges posed by our industry’s shift toward multicore. However, while that is certainly an important application, it is not the reason this piece admonishes you to know thy functional programming.

Mastery of the functional programming paradigm can greatly improve the quality of the code you write in other contexts. If you deeply understand and apply the functional paradigm, your designs will exhibit a much higher degree of referential transparency.

Referential transparency is a very desirable property: it implies that functions consistently yield the same results given the same input, irrespective of where and when they are invoked. That is, function evaluation depends less—ideally, not at all—on the side effects of mutable state.

A leading cause of defects in imperative code is attributable to mutable variables. Everyone reading this will have investigated why some value is not as expected in a particular situation. Visibility semantics can help to mitigate these insidious defects, or at least to drastically narrow down their location, but their true culprit may in fact be the providence of designs that ...