functional programming

All posts tagged functional programming

Functional Programming Glossary

Posted by Jacob Zimmerman on 2015-04-18
Posted in: Functional Programming. Tagged: . 4 Comments

I love functional programming. It’s great. While creating a few of its own small challenges, it helps to alleviate so many problems that we have in other styles of programming.

I love reading. Especially reading about programming. Especially reading about functional programming. What I don’t love is reading books where the author has his (or her, although I don’t think any of the programming books I’ve read were written by a woman) terminology wrong. Programming has a lot of big words in it, and functional has some that are kind of new to other types of programmers. To make sure you’re not mislead by an incorrect author, here is a small list of some words in functional programming. To be certain that I had it correct, I double-checked with wikipedia. Continue Reading

Reblog: The Decorator Pattern with Java 8

Posted by Jacob Zimmerman on 2015-04-16
Posted in: Design Patterns, Functional Programming, Java, Reblog. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

I love the decorator pattern. It’s the epitome of composition over inheritance and the greatness that can come from it. It also has potential for fluent APIs. In the following article, the writer presents a generic decorating method that I really like, for times when you may extend the list of decorators in the future and you don’t want to add additional methods for them.
Check it out!
http://blog.codefx.org/design/patterns/decorator-pattern-java-8/

A New Idea for Calling Functions

Posted by Jacob Zimmerman on 2015-03-28
Posted in: Functional Programming, Java, Python. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

Disclaimer: This is going to come off a bit ranty. I’m not as frustrated by the “problems” I bring us as it sounds; rather, it is used to emphasize why my thought processes did what it did. I’m not even going to be using header titles, which is weird for me 🙂

I’ve had a recent thought process about calling functions. It has been ceaselessly frustrating to me how functional languages (and even other languages at times) accomplish a certain goal.

That goal is chaining calls. Continue Reading

I Found My Java Remake!

Posted by Jacob Zimmerman on 2015-03-14
Posted in: Functional Programming, Java, Kotlin. Tagged: , , . Leave a comment

Back in January, I wrote a post about some changes I would love to see in the Java language that would make me like it a lot more (and would make it more modern). A lot of people suggested a lot of JVM languages, but I largely dismissed them because that’s not what I was looking for. I wanted Java to be different in these ways, since I’m not likely to convince my workplace to let me use something other than Java. And besides, most of the JVM languages suggested have some syntactic ideas that are simply difficult for my eyes to pick up on.

But…

But, then I found Kotlin. It’s a JVM language made by JetBrains, the creators of IntelliJ, PyCharm and a few other IDEs and tools. For the most part, I feel like these guys read my mind about what I wanted from my language. They missed a few things on my post, but they have so many things I had forgotten or didn’t even think about. Continue Reading

Pass Streams Instead of Lists

Posted by Jacob Zimmerman on 2015-02-21
Posted in: Functional Programming, Java. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Opening disclaimer: this isn’t always a good idea. I’ll present the idea, along with some of the reasons why it’s a good idea, but then I’ll talk about some instances where it’s not so great.

Being Lazy

As you may know, I’ve been dabbling in Python nearly as much as I’ve been working with Java. One thing that I’ve liked about Python as soon I found out about it is generators. They allow for lazy operations on collections, so you can pass iterators/generators around until you finally actually need the final result of the operations – without affecting the original collection (under most circumstances; but you’re not likely to affect it accidentally). Continue Reading