Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
NoSQL and functional
programming
This chapter covers
Functional programming basics
Examples of functional programming
Moving from imperative to functional programming
The world is concurrent. Things in the world don't share data. Things communicate
with messages. Things fail.
—Joe Armstrong, cocreator of Erlang
In this chapter, we'll look at functional programming, the benefits of using a func-
tional programming language, and how functional programming forces you to
think differently when creating and writing systems.
The transition to functional programming requires a paradigm shift away from
software designed to control state and toward software that has a focus on indepen-
dent data transformation. Most popular programming languages used today, such
as C, C++, Java, Ruby, and Python, were written with the needs of a single node as a
target platform in mind. Although the compilers and libraries for these languages
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