A new Java functional style

It’s been a while since JDK 8 was released, bringing plenty of new features to the Java language; among them the most expected feature was ,with no room for doubt, the introduction of Lambda expressions.
The release of Lambdas supposed one of the biggest quality jumps in the Java language in its history; mainly due to the fact that it opened a wide new range of possibilities to the language. Without them it’d be impossible to have the more flexible, expressive and simpler language that we can enjoy nowadays.

However, despite of having been available for a few years, I still see many developers struggle with them. That’s why I wanted to give a thorough explanation about them and more specifically about the biggest benefits in using them in our day-to-day as developers.

Let’s start then with a brief introduction to clarify some concepts!

Introduction

What is functional programming?

Functional programming is a programming paradigm which has its roots in lambda calculus that uses a declarative approach; instead of the most commonly known imperative paradigm.

What this means is that we define what has to be done, instead of defining how it has to be done and in what order.
We make use of functions in order to declare…