Thoughts on Functional Programming Podcast

One of the questions that came up a couple times was what is a Web framework? What does that even mean? I don’t want to get into philosophical discussion about what a framework is. Is it a library or framework or any of those kinds of questions. I’ll tell you what I meant, what I still mean by this assertion that we need one.

What I want to talk about is this issue of what is an action and what is a calculation in terms of timeliness, because we know that deep down in the computer, everything is an action. Every operation depends on what is that particular locations in memory at the time that the operation is run.

There are different patterns that we use as functional programmers to reduce the possible states so that it becomes easier to reason about. I think that this is something that we should talk about a little bit more, because it’s actually something that isn’t talked about much in imperative programming.

Today, we’re going to be talking actions. Now, as counter-intuitive as it may be, functional programming has more to say about actions than it does about data and calculations. At least, more interesting stuff to say.

The data tradition goes back to the early days of writing, and functional programming largely tries to learn lessons from those instead of doing what object-oriented programming tries to do, which is attach code to the data, so the data is inert. It just is what it is.

In a general sense, every operation depends on when it is run and how many times it is run. Using our language or some other discipline, we can say, “Well, that memory or the register, it’s kind of special. We’re not going to store anything important in there so that at any point we can overwrite it.”

Functional programming is a paradigm. Meaning, it is a set of ideas, it’s a set of concepts, a set of practices and almost like a theory of programming itself. It is a framework, meaning a mental framework for how to approach a problem that you’re trying to solve with software.