Naive functional programming in JS
A few months back I started with learning Haskell, my only goal was to learn the basics of functional programming and apply those skills to JS.
The book which I was reading taught me how to implement my own version of build into language function like map/filter/reduce usually using recursion.
After every chapter, once I made Haskell version of some function I always tried to do the same in JS and after a week I had a file with lots of nice helper functions.
Here are some patterns that I found while writing those helpers:
- recursion - instead of looping through a list using for/while, functions often call itself with n-1 elements from that list
- pattern matching - unfortunate, that is something missing in JS, so I had to replace it with if/else/switch and ES6 array destructuring
- partial application: create functions in a way that latest argument is the actual data, that helps to create functions of functions with applying partial application.
And here are my implementations of the tree most common functions: map/filter/reduce using recursion:
Obviously those implementations are far away from good and well performant, however, they can learn you some basic concepts of FP.
Finally, I put all functions in a small library called NaiveFP, that is right name, those implementations are really naive but at the same time good exercise.
Check out the full list of functions https://github.com/mutebg/naive-fp/blob/master/src/index.js and let me know of something could be done better.
