Ever since I saw Rich Hickey’s Simple Made Easy presentation, I have been wanting to learn Clojure. For the simple fact that it was designed by someone who has spent enough time thinking about problems faced with current generation of programming languages and the limitations they impose.
I’ve been intrigued by functional programming paradigm ever since my good friend enticed me to go through the book The Little Schemer. (If you have not read it yet, please do, it is a fascinating intro into understanding recursion). That journey started off a frantic rush which then tapered off after a while owing to various reasons. Now after going through Rich’s presentation and after having spent a good part of the last 5 yrs building .NET based enterprisey apps, I’m beginning to feel the need to jump back to learning functional programming principles better. The experiments with C#’s Linq helped understand the principles to a great extent.
For example, instead of
var tasks = new List<Task>();
foreach(var user in users)
{
var userTasks = Tasks.For(user.Id);
tasks.AddRange(userTasks);
}
return tasks;
prefer something like
return users.Select(user => Tasks.For(user.Id)).SelectMany(task => task).ToList();
This might seem like syntactic sugar at first glance. That is because the functional paradigm have been transplanted onto a object oriented language like C# using Linq. In a pure functional language like Clojure or Haskell, the syntax would feel more natural. Interestingly, the Linq implementation is purely via extension methods and not by extending the IEnumerable<T> interface. We’ll explore this bit in a follow up post.
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