Functional Programming using C++

We will dive into a specific programming challenge and get a feel for concise code by writing in a functional style.

You will learn to create and use anonymous functions and how to capture objects by value and by reference.

This time we will develop a very expressive and elegant solution to the task of finding the longest edge of a polygon.

You will see how something done with very good intentions can actually have a negative value.

We will see if we can do even better than our previous solutions to the challenges and also solve something new.

These two key concepts of functional programming will make our code even more concise and clear.

You will learn how chained data transformation can be expressed in a nice and readable way.

We will develop an example illustrating the similarities of functional programming and querying a database.

We will check out how we can glue functions together in an even more concise way.

We will develop two small command line tools and extract a useful reusable higher-order function from our code.

You will learn how to think functionally from the start when confronted with bigger, real-life programming problems.

You will see one of the advantages of higher-order functions and pureness in action.

Once you know them, you will recognize them almost everywhere.

You will see how different error handling strategies arise and learn about their particular pros and cons.

Functors - what they are are and how this concept helps us on our quest for good code.

In case you heard that monads are complicated, forget about it. You will not only see how they develop naturally, you will even learn how to implement one on your own.

You will see how easy it is to refactor functional code, and how you can efficiently mix it with object orientated parts, even in an existing legacy code base.

Writing unit tests for pure functions is great.

You will see how performance bottlenecks can be identified.

Modern applications often have to handle many requests simultaneously or need to scale to multiple CPUs to increase performance. You will learn how to manage these demands in a straightforward way.

If you have the feeling that some classical object oriented design patterns are unnecessary convoluted, you are right. You will utilize your new functional programming skills to make some of them vanish into thin air.

Functional programming seems to have a bright future in the C++ community. You will learn about available libraries and how your new skills are universal in regards to them.

Finally we will have a look at how the C++ standard might change in the future and how C++ will provide more and more functional tools out of the box.