Dublin Software Craftsmanship Community

Hands On Session - Introduction To Functional Programming

Introduction to Functional Programming

This month was back to a hands on session for the Dublin Software Craftsmanship meetup group. For most of the participants, It was their first exposure to functional programming principles and their first attempts using Scala.

Joe gave a great presentation that introduced the concepts of Functional Programming - click here to download. The presentation was heavy on coding without any side effects, where a function does not rely on data outside the current function and dosen’t change data that lives outside the current function. After the presentation, It was onto the exercises. Throughout the evening we worked through 6 exercises in total. We got exposure to mapping, reducing, folding, recursing and the use of higher order functions. In short, we were trying to code without any side effects.

The exercises that we worked through during the evening can be found here:

dubswcraft repo

Some photos from the evening:

intro-functional-programming-1.jpg intro-functional-programming-2.jpg intro-functional-programming-3.jpg intro-functional-programming-4.jpg

Some other useful links for delving into Functional Programming:

What is Functional Programming by Kris Jenkins

Functional Programming For the Rest of Us by Slava Akhmechet

Map, map and flatMap in Scala by Michael Brunton-Spall

Special thanks again to Barry Alistair in Techmeetup.space for providing the excellent venue. Thanks also to Gerry from Stack & Co for sponsoring the craft beers for the evening.

-Paul/Joe

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