#3: The Promises of Functional Programming

I think that functional programming is extremely interesting after almost 4 years of using only the imperative programming approach. The mathematical focus on functions and abstractions is what stands out the most to me as I've never considered that functions in programming could be the same as functions in mathemathics but with functional programming they're basically the same, which leads to some pretty interesting ways of writing code as you need to be much more creative.

One thing I do dislike a lot about functional programming is that you're not able to store and modify variables as freely as you are with imperative programming, since functions in imperative programming can write and read directly from the computer's memory it's way easier to handle data and individual values of variables. On the other hand, I do believe that the computing power that functional programming brings is a worthy trade-off for that since it makes certain operations way faster because of parallel computing.

I'd like to see functional programming being used more in software development as I believe you can make some pretty interesting products with it and maybe it ends up being easier than making something with imperative programming. But as it is right now I don't particularly enjoy learning and/or using functional programming because I'm too used to the imperative programming methodology.

Overall I do think that functional programming is an interesting topic worth learning about but personally I don't think it fits my way of thinking when writing code.

#1: Introduction

My name is Juan and I study computer science at Tec de Monterrey. I'm currently taking the Programming Languages course under Master Ariel Ortiz. My expectations for the course are that, first of all, I can understand why programming paradigms are useful and how to apply them to everyday programming. I want to be able to identify all programming paradigms and understand what makes each one of them useful in specific scenarios.

As for myself, I enjoy video games, card games and video games about cards. Lately I've been enjoying playing a new game called Legends of Runeterra, it's fun and interactive™.

The book I've enjoyed the most recently is the Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway. The TV show I've been obsessed with is The Handmaid's Tale.