What's the point of learning functional programming?
15 days ago
- #education
- #functional-programming
- #haskell
- The article discusses the pedagogical challenges of teaching functional programming, particularly Haskell, to students familiar with imperative languages like Python.
- It highlights a student's question about the purpose of learning functional programming if solutions can be mechanically translated from imperative code without grasping new concepts.
- The author presents the Knight's Tour problem as a case study, comparing a naive Python solution with a Haskell version that initially mirrors the imperative approach.
- The article advocates for 'wholemeal programming'—thinking in terms of entire data structures and transformations rather than step-by-step iteration—as a key benefit of functional programming.
- A more functional Haskell solution is developed, leveraging laziness to generate and explore the entire state space of possible knight moves without upfront computation.
- Key advantages of the functional approach include modularity, explicit state space representation, and the ability to compose solutions from simple, reusable components.
- The article concludes by emphasizing that functional programming offers unique problem-solving perspectives and techniques that can be valuable even when using other paradigms.