Introduction to Functional Programming

“One withstands the invasion of armies; one does not withstand the invasion of ideas.” — Victor Hugo

In recent times, functional programming has invaded codebases all around the world.

Look at the main programming languages. We wouldn’t be able to live without higher-order functions, those anonymous functions that new developers tend to extremely overuse, and other cutesy stuff.

This is not going to be a functional programming tutorial that will show how to use these features in JavaScript. You can find that on freeCodeCamp.

In what can only be described as “a crazy move that will decimate the view count of this article”, I’d rather talk about the paradigm from which these features have been captured from. Ready?

What is functional programming?

In short, functional programming is a catch-all term for a way of writing code that is focused on composing pure functions, actually using the innovations in type systems made in the last few decades, and overall being awesome.

So what’s the point? All of these things help to better understand what actually happens in our code.

And, once we do that, we gain:

• better maintainability for the codebase;