I wrote a rinky-dink Web application while teaching myself Ruby and Ruby on Rails. It turned out most of the pages were constructed from a database query returning a batch of results which then needed filtering, sorting and various kinds of massaging. I ended up really enjoying doing this work by applying a series of higher order functions like for() and map() to the data set. This got me started on thinking functionally.
Years later, I decided I wanted to do more with Lisp while continuing to work with the Java ecosystem. Clojure is a Lisp that runs on the JVM and is rather solidly functional. It's possible but very awkward to do mutation. If you don't want to run with shackles, you need to embrace immutability and FP. I found myself fighting FP until eventually I saw the light and was able to productively embrace it.
I wrote a rinky-dink Web application while teaching myself Ruby and Ruby on Rails. It turned out most of the pages were constructed from a database query returning a batch of results which then needed filtering, sorting and various kinds of massaging. I ended up really enjoying doing this work by applying a series of higher order functions like for() and map() to the data set. This got me started on thinking functionally.
Years later, I decided I wanted to do more with Lisp while continuing to work with the Java ecosystem. Clojure is a Lisp that runs on the JVM and is rather solidly functional. It's possible but very awkward to do mutation. If you don't want to run with shackles, you need to embrace immutability and FP. I found myself fighting FP until eventually I saw the light and was able to productively embrace it.