The Promises of Functional Programming

Over the time, the computer hardware, and thus, the programming languages have been evolving in order to make more robust software solutions. Although, there are some things that have changed, the overall idea is the same. For all programs, the idea is to read data from the memory and apply to them basic operations, and finally get the expected result from a cell of the memory. So, traditional programming is the most used today, though functional programming have been used by researchers for many years, it just starts to be popular. The reason is that functional and traditional programming are very different and programmers should learn and unlearn some concepts that don’t exist in the other one. But, functional programming let you to write more robust software and is easier to test. Moreover, it has advantages over imperative for concurrent and parallel programs.

Basically, the functional programming consists in realize the computation by functions, as we see in Math, a mapping from input to output. Also a function should return always the same value given an input. So, what we traditionally know as a function in the most of the languages are only subroutines. Another different thing is that functional programming doesn’t use variables. Also, it doesn’t have loops, instead it manages recursion that means that the function is going to call itself. So, there is a lot of concepts that both ways of programming don’t share. Therefore, programmers should change the way they think in order to solve a problem. I think that this what causes the friction between programmers and functional programming, because as we see it is very useful and it give us a lot of advantages, but the programmers resisted to change. Nevertheless, it is becoming popular and I think that over time, more and more will use it.