Functional Programming

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How did you get started with Functional Programming? (self.functional_programming)

submitted 1 year ago by cercerilla to c/functional_programming

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Hello fellow FP-Lemmyites. I'd love to hear stories about what got you interested in FP originally, and how you learned.

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[–] JackbyDev 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is just an anecdote and not how I began doing FP, but still fun. I was in college. For whatever reason I felt like I had to use methods (Java). So when the teacher had us do a FizzBuzz as a benchmark early in the semester (just to see where everyone was) I thought good programming used a lot of methods so I did something like String fizz() { return "3"; } String buzz() { return "5"; } and one of the professors asked me "Do you have a background in functional programming?" and I had never heard that before, so I thought, yeah, of course my programs function! So I said yes I did have a background in functional programming lol.

[–] cercerilla 4 points 1 year ago

A few years ago I volunteered to do mock interviews for a bunch of students who were getting ready to graduate from a bootcamp. I didn't know much about the bootcamp curriculum and I was surprised to see that all of the resumes listed functional programming as one of the key skills. I was curious, and asked the first few interviewees about their experience with FP and they made up some nonsensical answers with varying degrees of confidence. I finally asked one of them to just tell me what functional programming was, and was and they said "oh, you know, writing a program that functions!".

I made it a point of telling the students that it's a lot better to admit you don't know something rather than making something up in an interview, and reached out to the founder of the bootcamp to express my disappointment that they were sending people into interviews with blatantly false experience on their resume. I'm not sure if anything ever came of it, and from time to time I wonder how many graduates from that bootcamp are still going out into interviews with no idea that "functional programming" means anything other than writing programs that function.