Clase 3 - Blog Lenguajes de Programación

 Clase 3 - Blog Lenguajes de Programación


The Promises of Functional Programing 


First, I want to mention how hard is to wrap my mind around the idea of functional programming. Just as the article says the hardest part is not learning how it works if not to unlearn everything, we thought we knew about programming. So, this opinion piece is limited to my basic understanding of functional programming languages.

The most important abstraction What I got from the article is that the true value of functional programming is the lack of variables. As useful as we feel variables are in other programming languages, I am convinced they also present several setbacks and limitations. Most of them being data integrity and parallel programming, which are hard to solve with conventional programming languages. Based on this I do think functional programming has a future and some valuable characteristics.

I want to go deeper into what the author mentions as the valuable things of not having variables. The two obvious ones are that you have no concurrency problems in data so programs can run several processes at the same time with few complications and parallel programming. These two abilities open a door for more efficient programming and execution which has great value nowadays especially as we are seeing hardware capabilities not grow as fast as in the past. Another very valuable asset is how it manages functions as data, and these can be feed to other functions without problems. By doing these loops are replaced with nested or recursive functions that can go as deep as we can imagine. The abstraction in this language is created via functions instead of objects. So, it is easier to maintain the integrity of the processes and have no risk of altering data without control. All this creates a very good argument for using Functional programming languages.

To conclude I want to present my bottom-line opinion about functional programming. This is that as the title says the value of Functional languages is only a promise until now. Everything sounds great on the paper, but I really do not see how we could implement functional languages to the scale and efficiency needed for today's environment. So functional languages still have a long way to go before we can think of them replacing more conventional languages.


Mauricio Cassab Cohen  


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