Ask HN: How has functional programming influenced your thinking?

• talk-transcripts

  12 2,733 0.0

  Transcripts of Clojure-related talks

  Functional Core, Imperative Shell[1] is one of the most useful patterns. I will probably use it in every future project. Two major production projects that use FCIS are:

  - ReactJS: https://svitla.com/blog/functional-programming-in-typescript

  - CodeMirror/ProseMirror: https://codemirror.net/docs/guide/

  Another functional concept I find very useful is immutability. Immutability "clicked" for me after watching this talk[2]. I wish immutability was a first-class concept in JS/TS. (It will be, eventually.[3]) For now, I use immer.js for immutability in JS.

  In retrospect, my programming naturally tended to be "functional-esque. Now I do it very deliberately, even though the language isn't purely functional (JS/TS).

  [1]: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/18043058

  [2]: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

  [3]: https://fjolt.com/article/javascript-records-and-tuples

• matryoshka

  1 806 0.0 Scala

  Generalized recursion schemes and traversals for Scala.

  

  I did work in Scala for a few years. We employed Cats[1], and even a bit of Matryoshka[2] though most of the work I do today is in Python.

  Nowadays I think about computational requirements in terms of relations among behavioral dependencies. Like, "I want to perform operation O on input A and return a B. To do this, I'll need a way to a -> b and a way to b -> b -> b." I often pass these behavioral dependencies in as arguments and it tends to make the inner core of my programs pretty abstract and built up as layers of specificity.

  Zooming out nearly all the way, it makes me feel tethered in a qualitatively unique way to certain deep truths of the universe. In a Platonic sense, invoking certain ideas like a monad make me feel like I'm approaching the divine or at least one instantiation of a timeless universal that operates outside of material existence.

  I'd imagine some mathematicians might see the universe in a similar way - one where immortal relations between ontological forms exist beyond time and space and at the same time can be threaded through the material world by intellectual observation and when those two meet a beautiful collision occurs.

  1. https://typelevel.org/cats/

  2. https://github.com/precog/matryoshka

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• cats

  14 5,024 9.3 Scala

  Lightweight, modular, and extensible library for functional programming.

  

  I did work in Scala for a few years. We employed Cats[1], and even a bit of Matryoshka[2] though most of the work I do today is in Python.

  Nowadays I think about computational requirements in terms of relations among behavioral dependencies. Like, "I want to perform operation O on input A and return a B. To do this, I'll need a way to a -> b and a way to b -> b -> b." I often pass these behavioral dependencies in as arguments and it tends to make the inner core of my programs pretty abstract and built up as layers of specificity.

  Zooming out nearly all the way, it makes me feel tethered in a qualitatively unique way to certain deep truths of the universe. In a Platonic sense, invoking certain ideas like a monad make me feel like I'm approaching the divine or at least one instantiation of a timeless universal that operates outside of material existence.

  I'd imagine some mathematicians might see the universe in a similar way - one where immortal relations between ontological forms exist beyond time and space and at the same time can be threaded through the material world by intellectual observation and when those two meet a beautiful collision occurs.

  1. https://typelevel.org/cats/

  2. https://github.com/precog/matryoshka

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