Chapter 2
Putting Functional Programming into a Modern Context
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?
- Managing side effects
- Agile programming methodologies
- Declarative programming
- Functional programming as a mindset
- The feasibility of functional programming in C#
There have always been groups of programmers more interested in functional programming than in other schools of programming, and certain niches of the industry have provided a platform for those well versed in functional approaches and the underlying theory. At the same time, however, the mainstream of business application programming — the bread and butter of most programmers on platforms made by Microsoft and others — has evolved in a different direction. Object orientation and other forms of imperative programming have become the most widely used paradigms in this space of programming, to the extent that programmers have been neglecting other schools of thought more and more. For many, the realization that solutions to certain problems can be found by looking back to something “old” is initially a surprise.
One of the main reasons programmers become interested in functional programming today is the need for concurrency programming models. This need, in turn, comes from the evolution of the hardware toward multicore and multiprocessor setups. Programs no longer benefit very much from advances in technology like they did when increases in MHz were a main measurable reference point. Instead, programs need to be parallelized to take ...
