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Functional Programming

Functional programming builds on the concepts developed by Church when he created Lambda Calculus. We'll be using Elixir for this one, which is a wonderful language to use when discovering functional programming for the first time

Functional Programming: some people love it and claim itโ€™s the only way to write software. Others see it as a fad and roll their eyes.

Letโ€™s come away from those extremes. Functional Programming is based in a foundational concept which we learned about a few chapters ago: Lambda Calculus. Itโ€™s not magical, nor is it something you should ignore because youโ€™re amazing. It is simply something you need to understand.

Like most things in Computer Science, functional programming is full of jargon, idioms and practices that, at first, might be a bit opaque. If you take the time, however, to let it soak inโ€ฆ functional programming can change the way you write software if you come from an object-oriented background.

Updated on Nov 14, 2025