Functional Programming, How I started and Why?
I am not kind of Technical person who started hacking / coding in very early age. But I have special love / affection towards numbers. I don’t know why but it always fascinate me.
And this was the starting point or I can say reason I started baby steps in functional programming. I like DI, not in term of Dependency Injection but in case of Data Interpretation. Those tabular data and all the graphs and details that data can produce is awesome. It simply blow away my mind.
It is possible to do analysis in almost any language, but as I have heard it will be fairly easy with functional languages. As, I was coming from .Net background (Its just I am / was using as my day job.) I checked out F#.
I know about F# even 2 years back, when it was picking up the ground, but I thought I am no where near good with C# and one more language will just add more confusion. But now things are different. I am good with C# and love LINQ. And so, I gave shot to F#.
And trust me, it blows my mind. It was awesome. I never know that programming can be this much fun. It is like that whatever should be there is there. If I elaborate my last sentence then I can say that, normally I / we need to train our brain to learn any kind of language but in case of Functional Programming, language learn to think like me. I don’t have to put special effort for that. And this is the fun part.
Even if I copy - paste things I wrote on paper as part of pseudo code or algorithm in most of the cases it will work. There is no conversion from pseudo code to code. And that is power of language or I must say that is language. I don’t know why any functional languages is not getting taught in colleges. Even before C, there should be a lecture on Haskell, LISP or any other functional language.
My choose for this kind of language is entirely for wrong reason. I like mathematics and I don’t mind if someone throw some complicated theory on me. But for languages like this I choose just because of things like I can save my key strokes by not writing semi colons, functional composition is fun and easy and I can save lot and lots of time and efforts because of this feature. And more over writing code in functional language is fun.
There will be more detailed articles are coming, specifically for web and game. Two of areas I know one because of day job and one because of love, but till than here are some video’s you can enjoy.
I like this series so much, that I am still half way but I am felling blessed. It gives every possible in and out of functional programming with wonderful explanation.
Here is video for people like me who sometime can’t leave object oriented language and still like to use functional programming concepts. Jessica Kerr is sweetest speaker I have ever seen. If she explain in morning that there is moon out there, I think people even buy that too.
And how can I forget wonder woman Rachel Reese. After her explanation I now can claim that I know actors. I am not expert but still I am also not dumb now. All thanks to her.