The Promises of Functional Programming... and my struggle to learn that this promises are good



Oh functional programming, you are good, you are very good, after all this time in this Programming Languages course I can see why some people praise you and how convenient you can be depending on what we are trying to do. The article “The Promises of Functional Programming” doesn’t lie in its title and it really talks about how different and good are the things you can do and the way they work in a functional language like Lisp, or Clojure and the way the article presents them make you think (if you didn’t knew about functional programming before) that this way of programming its easier, better, even more elegant and at that point you may think why haven’t I heard from it before and why am I not using it, well the answer may be (maybe not, maybe it’s just me) in that changing your way of thinking, your way of programming coming from a background of a more imperative programming such as an object oriented paradigm can be kind of hard and frustrating at the beginning. One of the first challenges I encountered when starting with this type of programming is what is mentioned in the article about how functional programming doesn’t have variables, and you don’t have iteration, and oh god changing this kind of thinking really cost me because I was so accustomed to working with variables saving what I needed somewhere and using it later or changing it and you can’t do that, and its very well justified why you can’t do it in functional programming but at first it may cost you to drop what you are used to and help yourself with other tools, for example I found that functional abstractions can be very useful a lot of times and is something I never thought of before programming in clojure.

I think that functional programming can be very good, and I think it have helped me develop better practices as programmer for later times even if I don’t work with a language Like lisp or Clojure but I understand why a lot of people wouldn’t like this type of programming and I would say to them just give it a shot even though you may or may not like it, it will (probably) make you think in a different way and this can be very useful to develop a little more as a programmer in any sense.

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