Specifically, I’m interested in BEAM, but I’m not sure if I should go for Elixir or Gleam. What seems cool about Gleam is that it has static typing.
I have no experience with functional programming at all btw
F# is a decent introduction into functional programming. You can use .NET libraries and occasionally fall back to imperative code when needed.
I did a functional programming course in university snd we learned Haskell and really loved it. By far my favourite subject in all 4 years of uni. Have never used it since tho but it was fun XD
Erlang https://learnyousomeerlang.com/ If you know golang and recurrence it should be easy, google basically stole channels from Erlang and syntax from Swift. Like everything else, they just stealing stuff and claiming they’re great. Fucking rich script kiddies.
Using concepts from other programming languages isn’t stealing
Let me rephrase it. It wasn’t original idea. Scandinavian made it first Americans just copied and sold it.
I assume this suggestion will get me torched for reasons I don’t understand, but why not a multi-paradigm language like JavaScript/Typescript, or C#?
I second this. And bonus point: This way you’ll learn a language that has actual real world applications. All thos obscure single paradigm languages are nice toys to play around with, but that’s about it.
I feel like this is the way. It ensures you get exposed to multiple paradigms and can help you easily switch to a language that’s more invested in one paradigm.
Clojure is simple, is a lisp (huge plus since they are super simple and you gain access to a whole realm of languages), and practical. You can do anything from backend to frontend dev with it, and the philosophy and community are lovely.
Scheme is less practical but easier to start with.
Haskell is the least practical but isdefinitely beautiful and helps you understand things better.
gleam feels cozy.
Rust. It has all the good bits of functional programming but basically none of the bad bits.
Good bits:
- Strong type system (though not quite as sophisticated as Haskell or OCaml).
- Map, filter, etc.
- First class functions (though lifetimes can make this a bit awkward)
- Everything is an expression (well most things anyway).
Bad bits:
- “Point free style” and currying. IMO this is really elegant, but also makes code difficult to read very quickly. Not worth the trade-off IMO.
- No brackets/commas on function calls. Again this feels really elegant but in practice it really hurts readability.
- Global type inference. Rust requires explicit types on globals which is much much nicer.
- Custom operators. Again this is clever but unreadable.
- Small communities.
- Poor windows support (not a fundamental thing but it does seem to be an issue in practice for lots of functional languages).
The only things on the bad list that I agree with are top-level type inference and small communities. And ocamls windows support is terrible. Haskell’s is more than ok now.
In Haskell, any style guide worth its salt requires annotations on top level functions, and many of them also require annotations on local bindings. This pretty effectively works around the problem.
Bad code will be unreadable in any language of course. But the other things don’t themselves make code unreadable once you’re actually familiar with the language and its ecosystem.
Bad code will be unreadable in any language of course.
Yeah I’m talking about good code, or at least not bad code. Let’s not “no true Scotsman” this.
Even for good code you don’t need syntax highlighting to easily see which identifiers are function names and which are their parameters in Rust.
I would advise going in the opposite direction, learning a purely functional language first to then being able to appreciate functional parts
That is beside the point of an opinionated list of the good and the bad, that will differ for others
My ₹1. It may depend on what you plan to write in it (for fun). The BEAM sounds great for long-running processes, but not as much for point tools; Erlang and co supposedly run slower than Python, which isn’t fast either.
My other ₹ ;-) if you stick to the BEAM: OCaml sort of runs on it, as there is the Caramel project to replicate it (https://caramel.run/). One of the Erlang creators also ported Prolog to the BEAM (erlog), as well as Lua (erlua) and Lisp (LFE). Elixir is probably great, as it is inspired by Ruby (I found Ruby very pleasant, other languages have so much semantic noise).
Freebie! The BEAM inspired an inspirational design for parallel programming, the Pony language. I am somewhat sad development slowed down, it is a Rust killer.
₹ = Indian Rupee, in case anyone is wondering.
Rust is not fully functional. But I am legally obligated to recommend it any time I can.
Jokes aside, this doesn’t apply to you, since you seem to actively learn functional programming. But for people that are scared of it, rust looks like “normal” languages, but has tons of features that can be attributed to functional programming. Even more so if you avoid using references. You can easily “mutate” objects the functional way, by passing the object to the function, and the function creates a new object with just some value changed.
It has algebraic data types. Function pointers. Iterators. Pattern-based match statements. Don’t have class inheritance. Inmutable by default. Recursion. Monads. And probably other FP features that I’m missing.
It has basically every functional feature while having familiar syntax.
It’s also extremely easy to install. Which I didn’t use to appreciate, but then I tried to learn OCaml and had to give up because I couldn’t set up a proper dev environment on windows.
Rust certainly is an interesting language and very worth learning but, as you already pointed out, can hardly qualify as functional. It has some functional features and a rich type system for sure, but the way you solve problems in rust is mostly just imperatively and very different from the “FP-way” imo. If OP wants to get into FP specifically, I’d suggest picking a different language first.
On another note: Not quite sure why you’re saying OCaml ist hard to install, since the setup has been incredibly easy for me. Maybe the process has changed lately (they’ve been working on improving the tooling with opam and dune) but you can just follow the official installation instructions under https://ocaml.org/install and get it running in like 5 mins. If that doesn’t work, there’s always wsl.
Personally I’d suggest OCaml, as it’s a statically typed, expressive and pragmatic language with a decently sized and mature ecosystem. For learning resources there’s the wonderful Cornell book. Elixir is another hot contender and a pleasure to work with, as others have already pointed out. Pick Haskell if you’re interested in getting freaky later on and have built some foundational knowledge (personally I enjoyed the haskell mooc but there are other great resources like learn you a haskell for great good too).
It was years ago. So I don’t remember what exactly the problem was.
I believe ocaml has a shell interpreter and a compiler right? I managed to get the shell interpreter to work, but I couldn’t get one of these to work:
- Compiler
- LSP
The reason I prefer windows is because things just work. But it was a frustration with ocaml. Meanwhile rust was a single command for the compiler, and a single extension install for the LSP.
Elixir is quite amazing to write and read, the major libraries (Pheonix, Ecto, etc.) have excellent documentation, the tools are generally excellent and it is built on to BEAM which is amazing. But it is a dynamically typed language with all the pain that can incur. Of course, there are tools (such as Dialyzer) to give some amount of static type checking but they were not very good when I tried them some years ago. Using things that need mutation can also be a pain.
Programming Elixir 1.6 Functional |> Concurrent |> Pragmatic |> Funwas the book I used to learn functional programming and Elixir and it served me well.There are other good languages you can look into such as Ocaml (that has good free resources for new programmers) and Racket with the amazing free course you can find on OSSU.
I love functional programming and hate object oriented. It’s just how my brain thinks, I can and regularly do OOP, but I have to force myself to do it. Why not python? You can do BEAM in python, it’s pretty easy to learn, and it’s incredibly versatile, and you can program functionally in it too.
Python has OOP but basically no ergonomic support for FP? It doesn’t even support tail recursion or currying, lambdas are very limited and there is no nice way to compose functions. Most of the python ecosystem heavily relies on OOP and in many cases global state. Not hating on python but even compared to other mixed paradigm languages like javascript it’s on the less-functional side of things.
“Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.” — Eric S. Raymond, How to Become a Hacker
You misspelled Haskell.
I’d just like to mention ML, as I myself found its type system really enlightening.
For sure, and Ocaml is a dream
If you’re interested in BEAM anyways, Gleam is just a lovely language to work with. It makes many functional principles easy to work with rather than mathematical. Although I don’t have any experience in Elixir, so I can’t judge how it compares in detail.
Clojure always seems to be more popular than I expect it to be. Though I have no experience with it myself. It benefits from access to the JVM ecosystem as well I believe.
I love clj. in general it takes more of a pragmatic approach to functional programming than others. you get most of the purity for way less effort. same with specs over proper static types. it just ends up being a very enjoyable and productive language
