Functional Programming with C#

Preface

I attend developers’ conferences as often as I’m able and have noticed a trend. Each year, there always seems to be more content about functional programming (FP), not less. Often an entire track is dedicated to it, and the other talks include FP content somewhere as a talking point.

FP is slowly but surely becoming a big deal. Why is that?

Because FP is one of the greatest innovations in the history of software development. It’s also cool. Fun as well.

With the growth of concepts like containerization and serverless applications, FP isn’t just a bit of fun for developers’ free-time projects; it’s not a fad that’ll be forgotten in a few years. It has real benefit to bring to our stakeholders.

Further, in the .NET world, several additional factors are at play. Mads Torgerson, the C# lead designer, is himself a fan of FP, and one of the major driving forces behind the adoption of the functional paradigm into .NET. There’s also F#, the .NET functional language. Because F# and C# share a common runtime, many functional features requested by the F# team often become available in C# in some form as well.

The big questions remain, though: What is FP? And will I need to learn an entire new programming language just to be able to use it? The good news is that if you’re a .NET developer, you don’t need to spend large chunks of your own time learning a new technology just to stay up-to-date. You don’t even have to invest in another third-party library to add to your application’s ...