Functional Programming Need in Web Development
Whenever I talk about Functional Programming people with experience in web make faces. And seriously don’t blame them.
Issue is mainly Functional Programming stays in back ground only. If you see any starting example of any functional language is mainly some machine learning example or some complicated algorithm example. And that may effect normal people to getting started with Functional Programming.
But functional programming can do far more than that. And that include simple things too. And I means it can make thing simpler or I can say it can make easy thing simple.
Here, if I say have to put web case here. May be web is right now most appropriate place where functional programming can be used. And reason is damn simple, current web projects are getting bigger and bigger and user base is also getting even larger. Now, to support that hardware is also getting better and better.
Now, the only thing is there is a need of programming language that can use this kind of hardware. And this case Functional Programming comes in picture or I must say it is most suitable.
Because there are many things that are backed into the language that help with the situation. If I take one thing is immutability. As there are grid of processors, there is a need of multiple objects using the resource parallel and there will be need to manage state of the objects. With immutability there will be no state that can be mutated. So, it is very much easy to reason with.
But unfortunately we don’t utilize functional programming that much. And may be that is the reason we don’t know how easy and beautiful things code can be with the use of functional programming.
So, here I will be writing couple of articles or may be series to make a case how useful functional programming can be in the case of web development.
As, I am mainly from the .Net background I ll be talking about F# mostly. But the thing is, functional programming is not limited to that. If anyone is coming from the Java land, Scala is the language for you. And if anyone wants something dynamic and very near to LISP, clojure is for you.
I try to get taste of every possible language, few sample here and there. But things mainly will be for Functional programming and Web.
Hope that effort count.