The Promises of Functional Programming (Commentary)

Functional programming is the chinese of programming paradigms_ it's complicated, a lot of people speak it, you don't actually know anyone who speaks it, and everyone keeps telling you you should learn it because "it'll be useful in the near future."

As I've said time and time again in this blog, functional programming has its beauty, just like my unborn child will be beautiful to my eyes even if it's born with three ears. We have its elegant way of solving problems, its simple yet effective way of implementing loops and repeated processes, and its timeless support of concurrent and parallel programming.

It is important to learn chinese, maybe not for actually communicating with chinese people, or for simple bragging rights, but because by learning it, we may actually get some insight on how other languages work. This applies to functional programming too, we may gain some insight on how languages like Java or those languages that support recursion work.

I have praised LISP's ease of maintainability before, for it not containning a hell ton of code in its scripts or variables to worry about, which is great, because renaming variables takes about 75% of my "code-embelishment" time.