It’s simple: because it might make you a better programmer.

From the beginning: The process of learning the functional paradigm makes you “mentally” sweat. It’s hard and can make you give up. Hell, it can even make you fall in the cognitive trap that “FP is the only way”. But bear with me: it is worth it.

FP isn’t intrinsically hard – what makes it difficult is our “software developer” brain. We are already wired to think in an imperative and object oriented way and this is the main obstacle. What people should do is temporally forget how to program, but this is easier said than done.

When I said it’s worth it, it’s because functional programming is about concise, beautiful and powerful code. It makes your code smaller and so more effective and less error prone, and with less code you achieve easier maintainability. Furthermore, FP makes it easier to write parallel code replacing mutability and loops with functions and composition. As you master the functional way of thinking you’ll get a boost in productivity and happiness out of the succinctness, compositionality and clarity of your code.

I decided to write this small blog post because during this week Martin Odersky FP course on Coursera has restarted! I regret not doing the course the last time it took place, so I couldn’t let it go one more time :-D

I’ve closely watched some peers during the last course execution and I’m sure that it’ll be very rewarding. It starts with basics concepts and finishes with advanced computer science topics, and I’m very anxious about the challenge ;-)

It’s still time to sign up for the course without any penalty, so do it! I’m pretty sure you’ll not regret!