Functional programming

Functions are obviously central to functional programming. But then, so is the data that flows through our application. In fact, the data and its movement in a program is probably just as important as the implementation of the functions themselves, at least as far application design is concerned.

There's a strong affinity between functional programming and concurrent programming. In this section, we'll look at why this is, and how we can apply functional programming techniques that can result in stronger concurrent code.

Data in, data out

Functional programming is just as powerful as other programming paradigms. It's a different way of tackling the same problems. We use a different set of tools. For example, functions are the building blocks, and we'll use them to build our abstractions around data transformations. Imperative programming, on the other hand, use constructs, such as classes to build abstractions. The fundamental difference is that...