In this chapter, you will learn about another programming paradigm, called functional programming (FP), and the data structures associated with it.
Up until this chapter, you've learned about various data structures and collections frameworks. This book is about data structures and algorithms, so why a chapter on functional programming? The reason is quite simple; although Kotlin is not a pure functional language, it provides out-of-the-box support for functional programming, and functional programming requires a number of new data structures. We want you to be familiar with them, as well.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Introducing functional programming
- Immutability
- Exploring pure functions and their side effects
- Lambda and higher-order functions
- Functional data structures
- Introducing category theory
