Thoughts on Functional Programming Podcast

Monads are real, y’all. They are all around us. In this metaphor-free episode, I’ll share two real-world monads you interact with all the time. No burritos or space suits, I promise! Plus, we’ll see why monads are useful in Haskell.

My new book, Grokking Simplicity, all about functional programming, is now available in early access. The first three chapters are ready to read. Go to https://lispcast.com/gs, add the book to the cart, and use discount code MLNORMAND for 50% off.

My favorite definitions of parallelism and concurrency come from Brian Goetz. They are not the traditional ones, which focus mostly on # of cores. In modern computing, we are sharing so many resources, parallelism and concurrency need to account for that. In this episode, we go over those definitions.

A few people have asked me how to develop Level 3 thinking. I’m not sure. But I’ve got some directions to try. In this episode, I go over 3 and a half ways to develop algebraic thinking.

Level 3 of functional thinking is all about algebraic thinking. But what do I mean by algebra? In this episode, I try to distill down the characteristics of an algebra and explore why algebras are worth developing.

Level 1 of functional thinking is to distinguish between actions, calculations, and data. But what is a calculation? In this episode, we go over what it is, how to recognize them, and how to implement them. By the end, you should understand why they are so important to functional programming.

Because I promote functional programming, people often take what I say to mean that I don’t like OO. However, I think there’s a lot of cool stuff in OO. In this episode, I go over three or four things I think OO does really well.

You should throw away your code and try again, because it will make you a better programmer to try the same problem multiple times. Each time you can try a new style or approach to solving it. That’s how you get better.

Data Modeling is a common technique in functional prgramming. It means capturing the essence of the concepts of your domain, their attributes, and their relationships in data.