On a clear day while you’re aggressively sitting around fixing bugs for the maintain project from 2 years ago. Find all disorders up, then you also find the need to fix (ngonroi). Although it is just a piece of code using the find function of lodash , it is not normal at all.

The above code of course has been customized so it won’t be revealed =)). The doc of lodash is like this:

It looks a little different. Going to ask a brother, the answer came out:

If lodash fp (think) is written normally, it looks like this:

Lodash writes functional programming, parameter order is the opposite. I’m not used to it yet, I did not even understand what the saga’s generators looked like. Ok man, seems to live. .

Well on top of that is just a narrative for the reason today I wrote this article. It is about functional programming.

Functional programming?

Functional programming (FP) is a programming model – a style of constructing the structure and elements of a computer program – considering computation to evaluate learning functions and avoiding changes to states and data as well. subject to change. – Translate from Wikipedia .

FP is the process of building software using pure functions, avoiding sharing status, data change and side-effects. FP is a declaration, not required, and the application state goes through pure functions. In contrast to object-oriented programming, in which the application state is often shared and associated with methods in objects.

FP is a programming model, meaning it is a way of thinking about building software applications based on the fundamentals mentioned above. To talk about programming model examples, we can talk about object-oriented programming (Object Oriented Programming) or procedural programming (Procedural Programming).

The concept

Pure functions

A basic concept that you can first understand about FP is pure functions.

• It is the function that returns the same result if passed the same parameters.
• It does not cause any side effects.

Suppose that we need a function whose function is to calculate the area of ​​a circle. With an impure function, you will receive the radius as a parameter, and then perform the calculation with the formula radius * radius * PI .

In the above function, it uses the global variable PI and does not use it as a parameter to the function. If there is a change in the PI value, the result will be changed. Revise a bit as follows:

Or another example of an impure function is a random number generator.

Add an example of the function that passes an integer value as a parameter and returns the result by 1 more unit.

The function above did return a value of 1 unit, but it changed the counter variable. We try to fix the function to a pure function as follows:

The result is still increased by 1 unit but the counter value remains the same, unchanged.

The use of pure function makes it much easier to test. We do not need to mock anything and still be able to perform the test function in a simple way.

Immutability – Immutable

A property that does not change over time or is never changed.

An immutable object is an object that can be modified after it is created. In contrast, a mutable object is any mutable object that is any object that can be modified after it is created. Immutability is a central concept of FP because without it, the data flow in your program will be lost.

Before learning about FP, I still think that const in JS is the immutability attribute mentioned here. This seems to be true because the value of const not changed after creation. However, const does not create immutable objects. You can still change the properties of the object. Immutable objects are immutable. You can use freeze to make the value of an object really immutable.

You can easily see that the foo attribute value of object a not been changed. However, objects created by freeze are only freeze on the outside. With the example below, it is changed.

You can see that the parent property has not been changed and for the child properties it is still easy to change even if it uses freeze .

To solve this problem, many FP programming languages ​​use special invariant data structures. There are several libraries that can be mentioned such as Immutable.js or Mori .

Conclusion

The article seems to be not too long but to write it all down is too long, so it is in the next issues such as:

• Referential transparency
• Functions as first-class entities
• Higher-order functions

I will talk about the next article. Hopefully the article is not too difficult to understand. Thanks for watching ‍ .