Ask HN: How did you learn functional programming? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did you learn functional programming?

17 pointsxupybd15 comments

Functional programming is making its way into mainstream programming. Most of us know some basics and use them day to day but most don't have a deep understanding of functional programming. For those of you that do how did you get there?

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IMO there are two different types or schools of functional programming.

There is the Lisp/dynamic typing (Scheme, Clojure, Erlang, Elixir, Julia...) style:

Avoiding state from a correctness perspective is a basis but not necessarily the end-goal here.

The primary goals are to decrease complexity and coupling and increasing malleability, composability and empowering through interactive development (REPL).

And the statically typed (Haskell, OCaml, Scala, F#...) one:

Here there is a much stronger focus on internal consistency of programs, which enables stronger mathematical soundness and reasoning.

Note that this distinction is only in part equal to the general dynamic vs static one. Typing discipline is not completely orthogonal to the paradigm (for example imperative vs functional).

I personally am very much in the camp of the former and only have superficial understanding of the latter.

I always recommend SICP because it was the book that helped me 'get it'. But there might be more modern alternatives.

A question you can ask yourself: How do you approach programming?

- Your program design is usually very high level. A graph of ideas. Then you want to interactively and iteratively discover requirements and check assumptions. You strive for simplicity and want to gradually achieve robustness, only where needed.

- You think in terms of laying out rules and form. You want to infer the connections and implementations given those rules. You gain satisfaction from solving puzzles upfront to enable strong run-time guarantees and sound abstractions.

If you lean stronger towards one of these thinking models then you might consider diving deeper into its respective typing discipline.

I learned functional programming many years ago, by reading the book COMMON LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation by David S. Touretzky [1]. Incredible book, super beginner friendly; the chapter on Recursion in particular is one of my favourites. :)

[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/book.pdf

+10 for the chapter on recursion. It is not only a must read but probably the only thing one needs to read to understand Recursion.

I suspect Christopher Nolan read the chapter on recursion before writing Inception :-)

https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~plragde/flaneries/ the 'teach yourself racket' small book covers Hof, Lambdas, pattern matching, then you can take his other short course on Agda to learn dependent types.

Or try ocaml https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/2020sp/textbook/

Self taught more than a decade ago. JavaScript is my first programming language. In the language you can expressively use and pass around functions anywhere no differently than primitives.

Nesting functions provided a necessary structure that both includes containment and reference. At the time JavaScript did not have block scope, modules, or native classes. Also taking advantage of lexical scope in favor of prototypes/inheritance resulted in slightly faster execution. Really, for me, it was more about taking full advantage of lexical scope more than concern for what the function returned as a value.

I would see other people attempt to fake classes in the language and it was atrocious. First of all the code was ugly, but worse is that there absolutely no benefit to this. Clearly these other developers were just just trying to mimic some conventions they use in other languages without learning how to organize their code. That is the opposite of elegant and I didn’t want anything to do with it.

I actually learned functional programming first. The first language I spent any considerable amount of time with was Scheme, working through college textbooks and then later taking college courses.

Study lambda calculus first.

An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus

Book by Greg Michaelson

It's amazing it was published 31 years ago (1989) which shows that it's a timeless book to read.

This has been referenced from discussions a couple of times:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6093386

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3851352

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11578961

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10714770

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=773369

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16973546

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14395620

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13211603

To quote a SO answer on why learn lambda calculus[0]:

If you want to program in any functional programming language, it's essential. I mean, how useful is it to know about Turing machines? Well, if you write C, the language paradigm is quite close to Turing machines -- you have an instruction pointer and a current instruction, and the machine takes some action in the current state, and then ambles along to the next instruction.

In a functional language, you simply can't think like that -- that's not the language paradigm. You have to think back to lambda calculus, and how terms are evaluated there. It will be much harder for you to be effective in a functional language if you don't know lambda calculus.

[0] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/114581/how-helpful-is-kn...

I stopped reading through A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computing to check this book out. Honestly 20 pages into it seems like I need to go back and finish the first book before I have any hope of understanding the one you suggested.

I'll give it another try afterwards though.

Do you have to be strong in other forms of calculus prior to learned lambda calculus?

Calculus (from math) is not related to lambda calculus, they can be learned independently of each other.

There's a 1.25 hour class on Pluralsight that covers it: https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/functional-progr...

It's easy enough to pick up in an evening and explains it very well. It's behind a paywall but there's a free trial.

I tried learning FP with Clojure, but could not get my head around all the parenthesis. Somehow came across Elm, it's documentation is very beginner friendly (and so is the language itself). If you want to learn typed FP, Elm is the way to go. But typed FP is little difficult to pick up.

These days I would recommend Elixir, if you want to a hang of untyped FP.

If FP is going to survive within mainstream programming then it’s the “very basics“ of it that will carry it forward. It’s the difficulty of understanding and application OOP that is leading to OOP’s demise. Unfortunately, and incorrectly, the need for a “deep understanding” of either paradigm is not a factor that will lead to mass adoption.

I agree but think I'd benefit from a deep understanding of the tools I use inorder to correctly reason about the solutions I apply those tools too.

I think mass adoption appears to be happening. I don't know why it is merely an observation.

Start with Clojure then move to f# then Haskell.

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