Functional Programming Lessons Conclusion

As many others observe as well, one of the major reasons to write is to firm up ideas in one’s own head. Serializing an idea out into English words is still no guarantee one understands it deeply, but it is great progress over a very fuzzy idea that has never been fleshed out at all. I’ve known for a long time I wanted to sit down and write this out. But I had no idea how many principles I’ve either drawn out from my times with functional languages, or had sharpened by them forcing me on to certain paths that perhaps I would have walked eventually, in bits and pieces, but functional programming forced upon me in toto. And it wasn’t until I’d written several of these posts that I noticed the recurring theme of scale, that functional programming principles are best brought in to imperative languages at the medium scale rather than the micro scale. I find this insight to have been almost worth the writing on its own. I arranged these points roughly in order from least offensive to most ... Read full article.