Ask HN: Why Learn Functional Programming
What are some reasons to learn functional programming. I have tried learning it but it gets complicated understand few concepts.
* It's old as hell which means is battle proven * Before it was hard to understand since everything pointed to look at it with a "mathematical view" which not every developer has. Now there are more tutorials and "Blog posts" * New technologies emerged which follow the pattern with familiar syntax and great tooling.
Right now why should you? I'd say why not? If you already know OOP, FP can give you more ways on think about problems and solutions. Plus, it can give you a competitive advantage over other developers.
It is definitely not a hammer which can nail down everything, but it's a good tool to have around.
it's usually worth the effort. writing code in a functional way (even without a functional programming language) simplifies testing, often improves program stability and robustness. the more side-effect-free or pure blocks you have in your code, the easier you can build a composable or a concurrent program. basically, most of the principles of good software development (SOLID, DRY, KISS, ...) are native to FP.
Probably the most fascinating thing to me about programming is being able to learn a new approach and apply it in different languages or contexts.
Note to OP -- watch the SICP video series on YouTube here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB63C06FAF154F047. Get the book and work at it. It's great.
coming from a C/Java background, my earlier Python code looks absolutely like a typical imperative/OOP mixture and now every time I look at it I see parts that can be rewritten in a much cleaner, simpler, FP-like style. it's really one of the paradigms that changes the mind in some way.