The future of programming – a brief look at two functional programming languages
I have been a software developer for more than 8 years now, and all this time I have been developing software in imperative languages like C++, Java and C#. During the years I have occasionally had a taste of functional programming in the language Haskell. The interest has never been big enough to do some real software development, but lately I have looked more into a couple of other functional programming languages, namely Erlang and F#.
What is functional programming
Functional programming is a different programming paradigm than what most programmers are used to. Programs written in imperative languages like C++, C# and Java are sequential programs, whereas programs written in a functional programming languages (FPL) is an expression, an is evaluated as such.
So in a FPL you write expressions, and in imperative languages you write methods. Code written in a FPL is more concise and easier to understand, and in short the benefits of using a FPL are listed here:
- More concise code, which means faster development time and fewer bugs.
- More comprehensible code, which again leads to fewer bugs and higher reliability.
- Immutable state, which leads to more reliable programs since writing multithreaded programs is easier without having to worry about shared state, locks and the problems that arise from this. (more…)