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Functional bros be like
(lemmy.world)
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Keeping state managed. The data for the function will be very predictable. This is especially important when it comes to multithreading. You can't have a race condition where two things update the same data when they never update it that way at all.
Hm I'm having trouble visualizing this do you know a quick little example to illustrate this?
Rather than me coming up with an elaborate and contrived example, I suggest giving a language like Elixir a try. It tends to force you into thinking in terms of immutability. Bit of a learning curve if you're not used to it, but it just takes practice.
Ok how about this then, I frequently do something like this:
How would this be made better with a functional approach? And would be more legible, better in anyway?
I'd say this example doesn't fully show off what immutable data can do--it tends to help as things scale up to much larger code--but here's how I might do it in JS.
Results:
Notice that JavaScript has a bit of the immutability idea built in here. The
Array.flat()
returns a new array with flattened elements. That means we can chain the call toArray.join( " " )
. Theclasses
array is never modified, and we could keep using it as it was. Unfortunately, JavaScript doesn't always do that;push()
andpop()
modify the array in place.This particular example would show off its power a little more if there wasn't that initial
btn
class always there. Then you would end up with a leading space in your example, but handling it as an array this way avoids the problem.Very interesting. Actually the part you mention about there being an initial
'btn'
class is a good point. Using arrays and joining would be nice for that. I wish more people would chime in. Because between our two examples, I think mine is more readable. But yours would probably scale better. I also wonder about the performance implications of creating arrays. But that might be negligible.