Creating Beautiful Code with Functional Languages

I encourage everyone who is still sitting on the fence about whether to learn a functional language to read this Beautiful Code – The Manifesto article written by Lau B. Jensen.

To summarize, his point of writing beautiful code essentially avoids a lot of the pitfalls you get from Imperative languages.

Beautiful Code is…

• Concise – Free from both obvious and hidden ceremony
• Expressive – Compartmental in its architecture, showing intent
• Safe – Being explicit about state and time, defaulting to immutability

Of course, functional languages do all that. Therefore, functional languages create beautiful code. Trust me, you want to learn a functional language.

Try Haskell for size and read this book Real World Haskell which is a fantastic book to learn Haskell.

Or learn F# for those in the Microsoft space. I highly recommend Chris Smith‘s Programming F# book to learn F#.

Related posts:

1. Code You Should Not Be Writing – Part 3
2. Code You Should Not Be Writing – Part 1
3. Parallel Computing with Burton Smith
4. Code You Should Not Be Writing – Part 4
5. International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP) 2009 Videos