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Why Functional Programming Matters to Me

  • Chapter
The Beauty of Functional Code

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 8106))

Abstract

Functional programming advocates a style of programming in which the programmer seeks to find a sufficiently small, yet powerful, set of abstractions that capture an entire class of problems, and use these abstractions to solve a concrete problem. I illustrate this by means of a case study in which I implement the game Trax\(^{\raisebox{-0.6ex}{\tiny \texttrademark}}\). In this turn-based game two players attempt to create either a closed loop of a line of their own color, or make the line connect opposite ends of a tile set of some prescribed minimal dimensions. Trax\(^{\raisebox{-0.6ex}{\tiny \texttrademark}}\) is an attractive case because it has interesting computational problems, for which I use classical functional techniques, but also because it is a distributed multi-user application, for which I use the more recently developed iTask formalism.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Computing and Information Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9010, 6500 GL, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Peter Achten

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  1. Peter Achten
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Computing and Information Sciences (ICIS), Radboud University Nijmegen, Heijendaalseweg 135, 6525 AJ, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Peter Achten

  2. Institute for Computing and Information Sciences (ICIS), Radboud University Nijmegen, Heijendaalseweg 135,, 6525 AJ, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Pieter Koopman

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Achten, P. (2013). Why Functional Programming Matters to Me. In: Achten, P., Koopman, P. (eds) The Beauty of Functional Code. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8106. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40355-2_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40355-2_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-40354-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-40355-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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