I’ve long struggled to “get” functional programming - both its syntax, and it’s real world uses. Everything is so terse and abstract and I find the lack of clear expressiveness to be daunting. It all often feels too “magic” to me which makes me suspicious. Then I wonder “what’s in it for me?” - how does it make my job or life easier? (I find myself much less motivated to learn something new without a clear answer to these things.)
One things I’ve found enlightening is when participating in Advent of Code exercises, watching how people are able to solve problems using functional languages. While I may not always grok the solutions in their entirety I’m often impressed by the compactness and elegance.
I share your experience. What worked for me and enabled me to grok FP was using Linq in C# (using the extension-method syntax, not the keyword-based syntax). It started-off with me wanting to avoid typing “foreach” everywhere when processing lists/collections/etc and then it all followed from there.
My only complaint about FP, and Linq in particular, is that it can often result in suboptimal execution when you have preconditions that Linq isn’t aware-of, such as a known input size, or known uniqueness of some key-property - and there isn’t a way to supply hints. And C#’s weak support for contravariance, aieee. Still lightyears ahead of Java though :)
One things I’ve found enlightening is when participating in Advent of Code exercises, watching how people are able to solve problems using functional languages. While I may not always grok the solutions in their entirety I’m often impressed by the compactness and elegance.