Some years back I wrote the essay “Functional programming, meet OOP”. A few months ago I gave a talk loosely based on it but with some major improvements. It didn’t feel right to update the original post so instead I decided to rewrite it to go a little bit more in detail of the higher level concepts and to make it less Clojure-specific.

Recently I’ve been working on a personal project (a Tinder bot integrated with ChatGPT and using Telegram Bot API as UI). I started out with a small prototype in Ruby (like 40 lines script) however then I switched to Common Lisp.

The reason for it was that I wanted to use the language for a while but couldn’t bring myself to (because I hate LISP-2 and I also thought and still do that CL is a language equivalent of a dumpster).

My opinion of the language hasn’t changed but I did love the experience. And now I’m gonna try to explain why.

One of the things I dislike about JavaScript is how it intertwines object-oriented paradigm with functional programming. Ironically, that’s also the thing that I do like about JS. I like that I have a choice and JS actually does allow you to write functional code that looks natural (as opposed to Ruby that doesn’t even have actual functions per se).

However, the standard library in JavaScript is written in a OOP manner, meaning that you need to call methods on objects instead of using functions. This creates inconsistency when you write in functional style because you end up with code that uses both functions end methods: getUsers(ids).map(userToJson).

I’d much rather prefer to have a consistent function-oriented code. Lodash, defining a lot of commonly-used functions, basically provides functional alternative to JS methods from standard library.

Inspired by Implementing numbers in “pure” Ruby

When I started working with Elm programming language I was amazed how simple and yet powerful the type system is. It’s just shocking how far you can go with with just having some symbols and type constructors.

But how really far can we go? Well, I decided to test it out starting with implementing integers and expressions with them. I decided to use Haskell for that. Its laziness may be useful.

Originally posted on medium.com

I enjoy experimenting with programming paradigms and trying out some interesting (to me) ideas (some things become posts, like this and that). Recently I decided to see if I can write object-oriented code in a functional language.

Originally posted on medium.com

I love Ruby. I also love object-oriented programming. However, nowadays functional programming is getting more and more attention. And that’s not surprising because the functional paradigm has a lot of advantages.

Ruby, being a multi-paradigm language, allows us to write programs in a functional style. Let’s see if we can write a web application this way. Maybe we even end up inventing a web framework ;)