Functional Programming

#My limited experience with Functional Programming#

What I have been doing all this time at Recurse Center? I have been trying to learn the all new & hot functional programming paradigm: by learning Clojure. I also tried to understand why this paradigm is so popular these days.

##First, I felt in love## Sometimes, a simple example is better then thousand explanations! I remember writing boring Java code like the one below in college classes:

public static class SumOfSquaresHelper
{
   public static int Square(int i)
   {
      return i * i;
   }

   public static int SumOfSquares(int n)
   {
      int sum = 0;
      for (int i = 1; i <= n; i++)
      {
         sum += Square(i);
      }
      return sum;
   }
}

Compare to:

(defn square [x] (* x x))
(defn sum-of-squares [n] (reduce + (map square (range 0 (inc n)))

Unless you are paid by the number (of non-useful) lines of code you write, you will fall in love with the expresiveness and simplicity of LISP.

By the way, yes, I used static which is ugly and bad in the example in Java, but LISP is so simple, and its syntax is also so compact, that programs are usually very readable (once you get used to the lots of parens).

##Then came the pain ##

I began with tryclojure, then I tried some 4clojure problems, but my main source of learning was by trying to finish all the problems from 120 hour epic sax marathon. It was great, and I still plan to finish it all before finishing my batch, but it was exhausting. There are like 5 problems I did not finish yet.

I find it remarkable how hard it is to understand simple concepts in their extreme: recursion, reduce and map. The three of them are very simple ideas, but to learn these very simple ideas it is really painful, and a lot of exercises are required.

It reminded me of a phrase from Uncle Bob Martin, which is something like a programming paradigm is subtracting and not adding something to the way we program (reference). In the case of FP, direct assignments are subtracted. Okay, we can still do assignments in Clojure, it is just (def name value), but it is considered bad to do it unless it is a constant value!

Feeling the difficulty, I decided to try writing a bittorrent client in Clojure. It just reminded me of how I am used to assignment statements.

##Why functional programming?## After browsing on the web, I found out that LISP is from 1958! WHAT!?! This seems really OLD, and it’s a new trend? Why is it that we are only going in this direction now?

To answer the question, I think we have to understand what we gain by limiting the assignment statements we use while we program: we gain that we do not have modifications on “variables” on runtime, so it is easier to work with concurrency.

My guess is it happened just now because of the Moore’s Law problem. We don’t get faster processors anymore, but more cores per processor. Remember the age in which a 486 was like 2x slower than a Pentium? Now we have had the i3, i5 and i7 like 5 years?

Conclusion

The functional programming paradigm is here to stay. I like it and I will continue trying more with it. But I am not sure if it is the right fit for all the problems we might face while coding. Maybe it is good for some domains, but not for all.