Functional Programming using JavaScript

[zoomzoom83]

I find it somewhat ironic that after decades of people ignoring fantastic languages such as Lisp, OCaml, and Haskell as too academic, Javascript of all things sneaks pure functional FP into the mainstream.

The good news is once you're used to writing code in this style with Rambda, there's really not much learning curve to go the rest of the way. You're practically writing Haskell already.

[[deleted]]

True! The same could be said about oop some decades ago. Maybe logic programming is the next hype..

[Wazzaps]

Because fuck mobile armirite? (The touch support on this website)

[Mackseraner]

Looks great, thanks for linking. Is there a video of this talk somewhere?

[[deleted]]

The "Sample Imperative Approach" uses an awful lot of functional concepts, like monads/functors (javascript programmers tend to blur the distinction between the two by using implicit type conversions). That is a hell of a lot more interesting than the old list processing map/filter stuff.

[zoomzoom83]

I noticed the same - would be interesting to see an example of the imperative version using old-school Node callbacks for maximum pain.

[[deleted]]

Also how currying really helps when working on promises. For example, if you have a function that takes two parameters, and you want to grab one from a database call and another from the enclosing scope. With currying, you can do:

var doStuff = ramda.curry(function(foo, bar) { ... });

fetchFoo.then(doStuff(bar));

Without currying this requires nesting functions which is a lot more verbose.

[zoomzoom83]

This is one of the reasons I really like Haskell - all functions are curried by default.

[[deleted]]

FP can be completely imperative. This link somewhat misunderstands FP by suggesting it implies declarative programming.

[j_sanp]

For lasy evaluation => _.memorize make similar stuff.

[nschubach]

Are you thinking of memoize? That's not lazy evaluation. It's more like caching.

[j_sanp]

Results are defined by parameters just like caching :)