How Functional Programming Made Me Better at Perl

Mark Allen has been doing quite a bit of Erlang programming lately. This change in language has caused him to become much more familiar with functional programming topics. He contends (and proceeds to show) that learning functional programming makes you a better programmer.

Mark begins by mentioning some of the hallmark features of functional programming, including:

• No side effects
• Explicit mutation of state
• Deterministic functions

Mark talks a bit about pure functions and describes how in a truly functional program the order of operations does not matter.

Mark goes on to demonstrate multiple concepts and standard functional operations using examples from Erlang and OCaml.

Once he has established these fundamentals, he spends some time showing some equivalent functionality in Perl.

Mark's slides are available on Speaker Deck. A recording of the presentation is also available.

We had 12 people attending this month. As always, we'd like to thank HostGator, LLC for providing the meeting space and food for the group.