Lately we’ve seen and heard a lot about Functional programming. Why is it gaining so much momentum now? It’s old enough to be Object-oriented’s dad. It’s been exiled from the mainstream, forced into the esoteric mailing lists of the academic community since the days of disco. Yet, in the last few years, you can’t open hacker news without a mention of languages like f#, scala, erlang, or clojure…javascript.

Well I’m not going to answer those questions here. If you’re reading this page, chances are you already know of the insane power of FP* and your real question is: How do I learn this stuff?!

Check out this video: 

http://looprecur.com/learn/#

We’ll be teaching functional programming in javascript, but the ideas are easily translated into modern dynamically typed languages such as ruby and python. We’ll be teaching from a haskell perspective and writing a lot of point free, compositional code.

Unless we hear otherwise from you guys on these forms here to the right, we’ll be assuming an OO background and our examples will cater to this mindset. We’ll also assume things about your background and home life. And maybe even assume that your just here a spy to scrutinize our curriculum and denigrate our efforts. Don’t worry, we’ll still teach you the best we can despite your heinous plans.

Here are some things you will learn if we do our job:

* Referential Transparency and purity

* First class functions

* Higher order functions

* Declarative vs. Imperative

* Recursion patterns

* Type Signatures

* Partial Application and Composition

* Convert OO programs into Functional programs

* Patterns of Functional Design