The Promises of Functional Programming


The promises of functional programming.

With each problem comes a wide option of solutions, in some cases choosing the correct one is particularly easy, but when the solutions are not binary, choosing an actual adequate approach to the problem becomes hard. Something similar has been occurring for a long period of time with computational programming, the requirements of a software are becoming tougher as each year passes, and the options of the programmers to solve the issue are less, in recent years the ‘winner’ at this issues was Object Oriented Programming, it almost seemed as if OOP was the only viable option to create software, but as everything becomes more demanding, the actual way of making everything an object and leaving the whole responsibility and magnitude of the software to the developer seems to be not the best solution at all.

Nowadays there is another paradigm that seems to become stronger, not only because how powerful it can be, but also the security of the same, it is called ‘Functional Programming’ and has two main advantages over his competitors, concurrency and parallelism, don’t get me wrong, the other approaches can also develop this advantages, but functional programming almost seems to have been created for this, it has no room for collateral damage, the code has to be really well written in order to work, meaning the ‘responsibility’ of the main core actions of the code are no longer only for the developer.

The only setbacks it might had are the ‘conventions’ that seem to be so close to the software engineers, and by conventions I´m talking about variables and objects, in recent programming languages oriented to functional programming, such as Clojure, variables no longer exist, you have certain alternatives, but the main approach is to not use them at all anymore, this means, more synthetic code.

Functional programming is here to stay, it is simple to understand, very efficient and very adequate for the actual problems that software development faces, the only main concern I have as of today is how willing programmers are to leave behind their conventions and start adopting new paths.



References:
-       Ertuğrul Çetin. (2018). Why Clojure? I’ll tell you why…. Septiembre, 3, de Medium Sitio web: https://medium.com/@ertu.ctn/why-clojure-seriously-why-9f5e6f24dc29




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