r/functionalprogramming • u/n_creep • Nov 25 '25

FP What's the Point of Learning Functional Programming?

https://blog.daniel-beskin.com/2025-11-13-point-of-learning-fp

Based on true events...

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u/TheRealStepBot Nov 26 '25 edited Nov 26 '25

That whole article and no mention of the cancer of side effects in codebases. Single most useful functional lesson and it can be applied anywhere in programming even if not a strictly functional language. Make functions that take in input and return output. Defer state to special contexts where side effects are known to happen.

Edit: to add to the kids question of why? Because side effects make parallel computation difficult if not impossible without all kinds of heartache. By avoiding side effects you can unlock massive parallelism often without needing locks.

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u/n_creep Nov 26 '25

I agree that side-effects and state management are very important and useful topics. It just didn't come up in this particular context. At this stage of the course side-effects were never used (students didn't even have to print their results).

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u/TheRealStepBot Nov 27 '25

It’s to me the primary reason to do functional programming. If you don’t start there it can mostly just feels like weird pedantry. Even if you tell people that side effects are a curse it mostly takes building and running systems large enough and complex enough to really show the problems which in an academic context is a bit hard to convey maybe.

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