Functional programming

Functional programming has been around from the 1950's. Most modern programming languages (C++, C#, Java, etc.) have functional features; and they continue to gradually incorporate the well-proven functional ideas and features such as generics (parametric polymorphism), higher-order functions, lazy evaluation, resulting in a combination of imperative, object-oriented and functional paradigms.

Nonetheless, most mainstream languages (Java, C++, C#, VB) are not functional as they lack the proper foundation, either because their absorption of functional ideas is not yet complete, or because these ideas can't be fully or easily incorporated. One example is the lack of true polymorphism in C++ or straightforward higher-order functions in Java.

These shortcomings cause significant loss of productivity and come at a high cost: non-functional programs are more lengthy, more difficult to understand, and most importantly more costly to develop and maintain. Savings when functional languages are used are in the range of 20-80% in our experience, also echoed by the numerous comparative studies and research.

Domain-specific languages (DSLs)

The use of DSLs not only gives a concise syntax to describe the problem at hand in a less error-prone manner but also promotes the understanding of the underlying problem domain. Why do we have to deal with pointers, for loops, or static methods when we are writing a program that computes say the shortest path between two cities, C1 and C2? Consider the following instead:

   find Path in G(V, E) where
      first(Path)=C1 and last(Path)=C2
      and Path is valid in G(V, E)
      and cost(Path) is minimized

The benefits of DSLs are immense: programs in DSLs are much shorter and quicker to develop (gains of several fold), which improves understanding and maintainability dramatically. On the other hand, there is a significant one-time cost of initial development of the DSL.

At IntelliFactory we are experts at functional programming and DSL development. Contact us to see how we can help your company benefit.

Learn about Functional Programming

See what Anders Heljsberg, the chief architect of C# has to say on functional programming.

Anders Hejlsberg on LINQ and Functional Programming with Charlie Calvert In this interview Anders Heljsberg explains why LINQ and functional programming will change the way we develop applications. He goes back to prototyping LINQ and how ideas from functional programming helped their team make a leap with the level of abstraction. He talks about lambda expressions, composability using higher-order functions, expression trees, meta programming, pure functional programming and concurrency. Anders: "By incorporating (some of these) functional concepts it actually becomes possible to create higher level programming models."