Intro to Functional Programming via JavaScript

This is purely an academic exercise. Adam contacted recently with a link to a blog post on implementing the Y-combinator in JavaScript. There were a whole bunch of words that sound smart, such as

  1. Recursion
  2. Fixed point
  3. Y-combinator
  4. Memoization

It’s like a professor’s dream come true. I had seen the article a long time ago when I prepared a presentation for work about functional programming. Basically, it was an introduction to functional programming, and to help myself learn, I decided to take the extremely low-level paradigms in functional programming and implement them. JavaScript seemed like the natural language choice, since of the three languages I know pretty well (PHP, JavaScript, C#), it was the only one that supported closures in a convenient way. Sold.

Anyway, here’s the presentation. You just might learn something.

Reference articles:

January 2, 2010   Posted in: javascript

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