How I got into Functional Programming

For every language I try my first instinct is searching: "Functional programming in [language]"

My journey with functional started with Haskell, with these exact lines below:

inc n = n + 1
length :: [Integer] -> Integer length [] = 0
length (x:xs) = 1 + length xs

I (like most) knew mostly OOP at the time. This was a shock: "what's this mess!?" 🤯

Now (mostly) everything is functional for me 💁🏼‍♂️

This is how I got here 👇

Scheme (Racket) aka Lisp

I started with Lisp, specifically Racket (Scheme):

(lambda (x y) ; this is a comment
    (+ (* x x) (* y y)))

Completely different from anything I have seen before at the time 🤨

This language introduced me to some core ideas:

• Every program is an expression: computation is based on evaluating expressions (no statements)
• lambda functions (anonymous functions)
• Recursion (specifically tail recursion)
• Closures (higher order functions)
• Meta-programming (macros)

I'll probably never use Racket for a production app: the real value was learning its core programming ideas

Haskell (purity)

Haskell is a pure functional language.

A pure functional language enforces immutability and no side effects

A new bag of ideas here as well:

• Absence of side effects (purely functional computations) and how to deal with it (IO)
• Currying
• Type system
• Pattern matching (everywhere)
• Call-by-need (lazy evaluation)
• Typeclasses

My focus was to understand why these features are useful 🤔

This required exploring other languages to see how they deal with the same problems 👇

Dart

I was interested in implementing functional ideas in dart.

Turns how OOP does not adapt too well into pure functional:

abstract class HKT<G, A> {
  const HKT();
}
 
mixin Functor<G, A> on HKT<G, A> {
  HKT<G, B> map<B>(B Function(A a) f);
}

Nonetheless, the main ideas still remain and work:

• Managed side effects (IO, Task)
• Errors as values (Either)
• Immutability (map, fold)
• Pattern matching (since dart 3 🎉)
• Lambda functions

This is when I started using dartz, and then implemented the first version of fpdart

Typescript

Typescript is more "functional friendly":

• More focus on functions than classes
• Better type inference (especially function return types)
• More powerful type system (generic types)

My first library was purify-ts:

• Maybe (aka Option)
• Either
• Immutability
• Currying

Kotlin

Over time most language started adding more functional features: Kotlin is no exception.

I used Arrow:

• Coroutines (suspend) instead of IO
• map, fold, zip
• Option and Either

Kotlin and Dart share a similar OOP origin: the patterns used to achieve functional programming are similar as well

OCaml

Most recently I tried OCaml as well.

OCaml goes full into pattern matching. It looks more like Haskell:

let collect_digits dig str =
  let int_option = int_of_string_opt str in
  match dig, int_option with
  | Empty, None -> Empty
  | Empty, Some n -> Full (n, n)
  | Full (f, l), None -> Full (f, l)
  | Full (f, _), Some n -> Full (f, n)

At these point all the patterns start to repeat: immutability, no side effects, purity, lambda functions and more

Hopefully this gives you an idea of a typical "functional programming journey".

I encourage you to research more about the features and patterns that I mentioned to understand how you can benefit from these ideas.

Take a look also at Effect Systems: these are the next step 🚀

See you next 👋