Thoughts on Functional Programming Podcast

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.

Functional programmers divide up their code into three categories: actions, calculations, and data. Actions are everything that can have an effect on the world, or anything that can be affected. In this episode, we go deep into what it means to be an action.

Tail recursion is a kind of recursion that won’t blow the stack, so it’s just about as efficient as a while loop. Unfortunately, not all platforms support tail call removal, which is necessary for making tail recursion efficient. We talk about what it is and how to do it, even if your language doesn’t support it.

Memoization is a higher order function that caches another function. It can turn some slow functions into fast ones. It saves the result of a function call after the first time to the cache, so if you call the function again with the same arguments, it will find it in the cache.

Often, functionality starts off as code. It’s if statements and imperative ideas. But, over time, you notice patterns. Those patterns can be reified as data. And that gives us tremendous power. How so? We explore it in this episode.