The Promises of Functional Programming
Functional programming, although existing for quite some time now, haven´t grown up as much as the other languages (imperative and object-oriented) so to start learning a functional language when all your life has been around the other two languages can be confusing and difficult.
The differences are evident from the beginning, the syntax in Clojure for example, with all those parentheses, are frustrating to handle in the beginning, however, this text shows the benefits that the functional programming has and that make it worth to learn a new language with a completely different "way" of coding.
The main advantage that I agree with the reading is the benefits of concurrency and parallelism, functional programming doesn't use variables, so the main problems with these two things can be, in theory, be solved easily or avoided, however, like I said at the beginning of this entry, functional programming isn't as mature and developed to handle this, it is capable in theory, but, until now, there appears that no one has managed to develop a program that fully uses this potential, soon that program may come but considering that functional languages are not something new, I'm thinking that when that program comes it may be to late, quantic computing is rising and I think that it shall beat what functional programming might do.
Whether functional programming matures, or quantum computing gets popularized, there is still some time for that to happen so, in the meantime, it may be useful to fully exploit what functional programming can do.
From the main differences that I managed to spot and understand is the recursion and the meaning that a function has on this kind of programming, I liked and personally prefer the approach of recursion instead of loops, to call again the function instead of just repeating a part I think is easier to implement, may sound contradictory but depending on the approach used for the function it may be a good thing and simplify everything or do more more complex what on other languages may be easier.
The differences are evident from the beginning, the syntax in Clojure for example, with all those parentheses, are frustrating to handle in the beginning, however, this text shows the benefits that the functional programming has and that make it worth to learn a new language with a completely different "way" of coding.
The main advantage that I agree with the reading is the benefits of concurrency and parallelism, functional programming doesn't use variables, so the main problems with these two things can be, in theory, be solved easily or avoided, however, like I said at the beginning of this entry, functional programming isn't as mature and developed to handle this, it is capable in theory, but, until now, there appears that no one has managed to develop a program that fully uses this potential, soon that program may come but considering that functional languages are not something new, I'm thinking that when that program comes it may be to late, quantic computing is rising and I think that it shall beat what functional programming might do.
Whether functional programming matures, or quantum computing gets popularized, there is still some time for that to happen so, in the meantime, it may be useful to fully exploit what functional programming can do.
From the main differences that I managed to spot and understand is the recursion and the meaning that a function has on this kind of programming, I liked and personally prefer the approach of recursion instead of loops, to call again the function instead of just repeating a part I think is easier to implement, may sound contradictory but depending on the approach used for the function it may be a good thing and simplify everything or do more more complex what on other languages may be easier.
Comentarios
Publicar un comentario