Here’s the original text for “Flexibility Through Immutability“, for those of you who prefer reading to watching a video.
It’s a bit of a long read, so I’ve divided it into two parts. The first one focuses on the motivations behind preferring immutable data, and the second one (which will go up on Wednesday) on how to go about it.
While functional programming has a lot of advantages, the more I worked on the paradigm, the more surprised I was at how much thinking in a functional manner made refactoring easier.
As happy as I am to sell people on Clojure, I realized that teams could benefit from adopting some functional programming ideas even on their current language. I decided to try a different approach, and gave a talk at the 2016 ITAKE Unconference in Bucharest, elaborating on the benefits of immutable data. I wanted to focus on how the functional paradigm has a value in-and-of-itself. A secondary goal was to provide some tips that teams who can’t yet pull away from C# or Java can put into effect to help.
You’ll find my screen recording, as well as the slides, below.
I love Clojure.
Once you have tried it and enjoyed its advantages, you just don’t want to go back. But those same qualities that make you love it can make it easy to forget that, for someone who’s first encountering it, Clojure can be a threatening, scary area far outside their comfort zone.
A few weeks ago I gave a talk at the Bucharest Functional Programming Meet Up. The title was Clojure All The Way Down, since my initial plan was to focus on how to program web applications completely in Clojure (both the browser client and back end), and what it brings to the table.
Two things happened as I prepared the talk.