Functional Programming in C#: Classic Programming Techniques for Modern Projects

THE RELATIONSHIP TO OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING

It is a common assumption that the ideas of functional programming are incompatible with those of other schools of programming. In reality, most languages available today are hybrid in the sense that they don’t focus exclusively on one programming technique. There’s no reason why they should, either, because different techniques can often complement one another.

Object oriented programming brings a number of interesting aspects to the table. One of them is a strong focus on encapsulation, combining data and behavior into classes and objects, and defining interfaces for their interaction. These ideas help object oriented languages promote modularization and a certain kind of reuse on the basis of the modules programmers create. An aspect that’s responsible for the wide adoption object oriented programming languages have seen in mainstream programming is the way they allow modeling of real-world scenarios in computer programs. Many business application scenarios are focused on data storage, and the data in question is often related to physical items, which have properties and are often defined and distinguished by the way they interact with other items in their environments. As a result, object oriented mechanisms are not just widely applicable, but they are also easy to grasp.

When looking at a complicated industrial machine, for example, many programmers immediately come up with a way of modeling it in code as a collection of the ...