Coming from an object-oriented background ourselves, we can't emphasize enough how valuable this shift is. Adopting the functional programming paradigm brings along some benefits, such as the following:
- The data-transformation flow becomes more evident. This is in contrast with what usually happens in object-oriented programming, where objects strive to encapsulate the data; in functional programming, we mutate data using functions. This makes the transformations that are applied to the data explicit, which in turn makes the applications written this way easier to understand.
- Functions are (mostly) side-effect-free. With immutable data, you can be sure that the value of a certain variable you hold a reference ...
