August 2022
Intermediate to advanced
135 pages
2h 51m
English
Content preview from Learning Functional Programming
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Appendix. Scala
Why am I devoting an appendix to one particular programming language? My experience of programming in many languages combined with my experience of FP has taught me that although it is possible to express functional concepts in any language, to one extent or another, some languages lend themselves more naturally to functional thinking and expression.
Note
While it is possible to express functional concepts in virtually any language, a language that was designed to partially or fully support functional constructs makes it easier to learn and appreciate what FP is all about.
It is for this reason that I have decided to introduce examples in a few different languages, so that you can see how one might go about expressing functional concepts with a variety of tools and capabilities. However, it is my sincere belief that to fully appreciate the beauty and utility of functional concepts, one needs to see them expressed in a language that was designed with these ends in mind.
I could have chosen Haskell, a purely functional language that is in many ways the archetypical functional language, but I thought it best to err on the side of practicality. So I chose Scala, which is a hybrid language. Its designer, Martin Odersky, wanted a language that could produce functional code and object-oriented code equally well.
Note
Scala is a hybrid language. It was designed to support both the object-oriented and functional paradigms.
There are examples in other languages in the ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.