Functional Programming Lite

I began the profession writing COBOL for a few years before moving into Visual Basic and writing still more mostly procedural programs. But as much of the industry had jumped onto the object-oriented programming bandwagon, I moved yet again into the likes of VB.NET, C#, JavaScript and Ruby, always learning but feeling no closer to actually arriving. It wasn’t until I discovered just enough of the functional paradigm to be dangerous I felt I had.

Perhaps exposure to functional programming left you with the impression it was gratuitously complex. If you couldn’t see how wrapping computation in a monad made life easier, this guide is for you. Its aim is not to enlist you into the dojo of functional programming, or to lead you into the deep end of the pool. It’s to give you just enough to be dangerous. It’ll show you how to write programs which are more managable, more maintainable.

Bruce Lee chose to not limit himself to a single school of thought. He emphasized adaptability and practicality in martial arts which lead to his Jeet Kune Do philosophy. In that vein, you’ll discover how the functional mindset can be used along with the procedural and object-oriented ones. It adds to what you know. It doesn’t replace it.

Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.

Bruce Lee

Consider the carpenter who having built dozens of homes had never before seen nails—or a hammer. Then, consider how he must have felt once he did!

The hammer and nails are coming. Let me show you a way of thinking about programming you’ve, perhaps, never before seen.

ML