FPF #0: Functional Programming Fridays!
Oh, hi! If you’re anything like me, stranger on the internet, you’ve been thinking to yourself lately, “wowie, there sure is a lot of talk about functional programming these days.” So you poke around on the internet, and you see all these articles talking about currying functions, immutable data, and recursion.
So you slowly close your computer, stand up, and go slide into a dark corner to cry and re-evaluate all the life choices you made that led you to this point.
But fear not! I’m back from the dark corner of tears, and I’m here to tell you that actually, functional programming is pretty neat! Also, as it will be Friday when this goes up, and I am a sucker for punchy little titles like that one up there, I’m going to take you by the hand, internet stranger, and we will walk this path together. Hand in immutable hand!
A bit about me before we get started…
I’m a self taught programmer who has been at it for about a year and a half, and before that I did graphic design. I have been using Javascript predominantly the past year, and I did a bit of Ruby prior to that, which got me interested. I’m telling you this so you know that I am by no means an expert. I will probably (most surely) make mistakes, and may not see obviously better ways to refactor. That being said, I love learning and I love helping other people learn. So with your help, I think we can improve our programming skillz together.
The format:
Every week, I will be back with some new functional programming concepts, problems to work through, and a little open-book test for you! I will leave you with a few problems that use the concepts we work on that week. I’d love to see how you all solved them, so if you want to share or have a problem, leave me a comment on the article or hit me up on twitter (@spacebrayn).
The following week, we will go through the previous weeks problems and I will show you how I solved them (or if anyone sent in a clever other way, will shout them out), then start again.
This is not a crash course, by any means. The aim is more to add some tools to our repertoire in nice little bite-sized chunks.
The first part will be an introduction to get us started with some of the core, fundamental concepts. The first few will start in JavaScript, because that’s what I use the most. But after we get some concepts down, we may head on over to Elm, because I want to learn it, and hey, maybe you do too.
Well, that’s it for post number 0. If you have any topics you’d like covered, comment or tweet at me, and I’ll try my best to work them in.
Why don’t you head on over to FPF#1 and get this party started?!
❤ — Bryan.
