Chapter 1. The Powers of JavaScript's Functional Side – a Demonstration

Introduction

For decades, functional programming has been the darling of computer science aficionados, prized for its mathematical purity and puzzling nature that kept it hidden in dusty computer labs occupied by data scientists and PhD hopefuls. But now, it is going through a resurgence, thanks to modern languages such as Python, Julia, Ruby, Clojure and—last but not least—JavaScipt.

JavaScript, you say? The web's scripting language? Yes!

JavaScript has proven to be an important technology that isn't going away for quite a while. This is largely due to the fact that it is capable of being reborn and extended with new frameworks and libraries, such as backbone.js, jQuery, Dojo, underscore.js, and many more. This is directly related to JavaScript's true identity as a functional programming language. An understanding of functional programming with JavaScript will be...