Chapter 3. Setting Up the Functional Programming Environment
Introduction
Do we need to know advanced math—category theory, Lambda calculus, polymorphisms—just to write applications with functional programming? Do we need to reinvent the wheel? The short answer to both these questions is no.
In this chapter, we will do our best to survey everything that can impact the way we write our functional applications in JavaScript.
- Libraries
- Toolkits
- Development environments
- Functional language that compiles to JavaScript
- And more
Please understand that the current landscape of functional libraries for JavaScript is a very fluid one. Like all aspects of computer programming, the community can change in a heartbeat; new libraries can be adopted and old ones can be abandoned. For instance, during the writing process of this very book, the popular and stable Node.js
platform for I/O has been forked by its open source community. Its future is vague.
Therefore, the most important concept...