Functional Programming

Scala lets you write code in an object-oriented programming (OOP) style, a functional programming (FP) style, and even in a hybrid style, using both approaches in combination. This book assumes that you’re coming to Scala from an OOP language like Java, C++, or C#, so outside of covering Scala classes, there aren’t any special sections about OOP in this book. But because the FP style is still relatively new to many developers, we’ll provide a brief introduction to Scala’s support for FP in the next several lessons.

Functional programming is a style of programming that emphasizes writing applications using only pure functions and immutable values. As Alvin Alexander wrote in Functional Programming, Simplified, rather than using that description, it can be helpful to say that functional programmers have an extremely strong desire to see their code as math — to see the combination of their functions as a series of algebraic equations. In that regard, you could say that functional programmers like to think of themselves as mathematicians. That’s the driving desire that leads them to use only pure functions and immutable values, because that’s what you use in algebra and other forms of math.

Functional programming is a large topic, and there’s no simple way to condense the entire topic into this little book, but in the following lessons we’ll give you a taste of FP, and show some of the tools Scala provides for developers to write functional code.