Jon's Programming Blog

An Introduction to Functional Programming in JavaScript

This is the talk I gave at the JavaScript meetup in Phoenix. One the othe largest programming meetups in the valley.

Here are the slides to the talk.

Here’s some books that can help you get ramped up into the functional programming paradigm Introducing functional programming with Underscore.js by Michael Fogus. And for a more in depth look into functional patterns Professor Frisby’s Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming.

Some additional resources of people that have come to embrace the functional programming concepts:

John Carmack on why and how functional programming can help with game development..

Richard Feldman found writing in Elm made refactoring easier, improved productivity, and code quality.

Paul Graham attributes his company’s success on using LISP for faster iterations and quickly creating new features.

WhatsApp scaled to millions with a very small team.

Talk Description

Functional programming is a programming-language paradigm that helps programmers write better code that is easier to understand. As computers have become faster many people are looking back at the advantages of functional programming and incorporating the ideas into their products. Many JavaScript libraries and frameworks have also been incorporating functional programming concepts; such as Lodash, Ramda, React, and many more. Come and learn what is functional programming; learn the history of functional programming in JavaScript; learn the pros and cons of functional programming; and learn some core concepts of functional programming that can improve the quality of your software.

Jon Nyman is full stack web developer who is passionate about the functional paradigm of programming. He programmed in Node.js for about 8 months and now spends most of his time writing C#, F#, and T-SQL.

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