THE PROMISES OF FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING

This blog talks about the advantages of functional programming. It helps the reader to understand what makes Clojure language a powerful tool for parallelizing and dealing with concurrency.

 To use functional programming, we must compute functions, a mapping from input values to output values, the function returns the same output when given the same input and it´s only task is to return a value without side effects. As a function, does not change anything in memory, variables are not needed, this makes a great advantage because unlike traditional programming, you can trace the function call chain to know where a value came from.

Functional programming uses abstraction, so we can use a higher-order function as a result. This kind of functions uses another function as a parameter and return a function as a result, with these functions is easier to implement patterns that occur repeatedly inside an algorithm.

Clojure is a Lisp derivation, it is a functional in terms that it deals with the mathematical definition of a function, every new function defined by the opening of a parenthesis returns either a value, or another function.

Clojure uses recursion, and lazy sequences instead of typical loops to manage concurrency. It also talks about that we must make use of this kind of functional languages to take advantage from non-stopping technological world.

Concurrency and parallelism are gaining importance because single threaded performance is not improving as it used to, and computer hardware is getting more powerful and to take advantage of this power, concurrency and parallelism are to be used.

Concurrency is difficult to use because several threads need to coordinate to not use data at the same time to avoid errors in the result, this is currently solved by locks, semaphores, etc.

Functional programming offers regarding concurrency and parallelism, there is a long way until parallel programming is possible as it is imagined