Hello fellow FP-Lemmyites. I’d love to hear stories about what got you interested in FP originally, and how you learned.
I got a book on Haskell at half price books.
After watching some FP popularization talks on Youtube I tried to learn Haskell and Clojure for fun, but quickly ran out of steam after first couple of exercises, feeling that I can’t get real advantage here. Then the other day I needed to make a simple web app. Being new to frontend I thought to myself after tasting all the recommended JS frameworks: there must be something better than this. After some research I picked up the “Elm in Action” by R. Feldman and everything just clicked :)
This is just an anecdote and not how I began doing FP, but still fun. I was in college. For whatever reason I felt like I had to use methods (Java). So when the teacher had us do a FizzBuzz as a benchmark early in the semester (just to see where everyone was) I thought good programming used a lot of methods so I did something like
String fizz() { return "3"; } String buzz() { return "5"; }
and one of the professors asked me “Do you have a background in functional programming?” and I had never heard that before, so I thought, yeah, of course my programs function! So I said yes I did have a background in functional programming lol.