Real-World Functional Programming

Chapter 1. Thinking differently

This chapter covers

• Understanding functional programming
• Increasing productivity with functional ideas
• Writing efficient and readable code
• Implementing your first F# application

Functional languages are expressive, accomplishing great feats using short, succinct, and readable code. All this is possible because functional languages provide richer ways for expressing abstractions. We can hide how the code executes and specify only the desired results. The code that specifies how to achieve the results is written only once. Thanks to the rich abstractions, we can hide all the complexity in libraries.

This different approach to programming has far-reaching implications for real-world applications. This way of ...