19.5.2025
I recently chatted with a friedn who told me he sees functional programming everywhere around and so he bought a book about it and is going trhough it.
The brought back a long standing question in my head how to succintly describe the value of functional programming or learning thereof without being dogmatic and repeating phrases that do not relate to the majority of developers.
I believe the value of learning some functional programming lies in a slight mindset change. In particular in beccoming aware of and more sensitive to side effects and to state management.
I was tempted to also mention composition, but I belive that is the result of the former two. Also I have observed functional composition to be quite difficult to grasp and use in practices by many talented develpers. It is hard.
I think the two main reasons why higher order functions and composition are hard in practice is that