Functional programming learning path

ML and Racket… everything I’m looking forward to cover the basics .

This looks really interesting, specially because it mentions:

New examples featuring the ARM and x86 64-bit architectures

Just wondering how the book reconciles a “high level language” and the computer’s architecture. I personally didn’t get “programming computers” until I learned Assembly and saw C being compiled into it, before that everything was so confusing .

Well, maybe this book Bought it this month, god only knows when I’ll get around to reading it…

Language Lust - eh? Just came across this: Programming Languages, Part A

Thank you both for the recommendation!

This might be for you: https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com. Aside from anything else, Scott Wlashin’s site has some excellent material on functional programming in general.

This MOOC, thought by Erik Meijer, is pretty good (archived, but material is still available): Course | edX

It uses Haskell, so there’s an emphasis on static typing as well, but that’s hardly a drawback.

Yes! but I have been glancing too much at other languages and been delaying learning F# which I could maybe use regularly.

Seems like you are just about ripe to branch out into F#.

I started my path with Programming Elixir and I have to say that the first chapters gave me a really good introduction to Recursion, Pattern Matching and the use of Tuples.

The Functional Programming Fundamentals lectures from Erik Meijer do a really good job of explaining the foundations of FP usually making direct comparisons between Haskell and C#.

My day to day work requires C# and I have been very happily adapting concepts learned from Elixir into it. I recently hit a wall on “how much more” could I exploit C# as a FP language and Functional Programming in C# has been revealing. To an extent it feels like “C# the Good Parts”.

While I have personally not delved into Racket, it seems like it would be the best point of entry regardless of your previous experience.

I’m primarily thinking about how class or object-based OO embrace mutability. Functional languages tend to be immutable by default - in BEAM languages one has to employ recursion to emulate mutable state which is used inside processes to give them mutable state.

Now traditional OO uses mutability at the lowest level and usually as a consequence mutability is everywhere. These days “mutability” is the new “goto”. In the past mutability wasn’t largely an issue because the technology we were working with limited us to unshared mutable data - but things got a lot more complicated when threads and multi-cores want and need to share data. Yet a lot of today’s mainstream technology is still rooted in the past world of “unshared mutable data”.

Mutability encourages PLOP (Place-OrientedProgramming) while immutability requires “Programming with Values” - that requires a major shift in mindset.

It is possible to work with immutable objects but it fundamentally changes the nature of methods (and how objects interact) - methods no longer “send a message to change the object’s internal state” but instead methods either return immutable parts of the object or return an immutable version of the original object that differs from the original in some specified way. Immutable objects are about values - not (internal) mutable state.