What the developer of decentralized application developer needs to know about functional programming?
People associated with blockchain development will find it useful to know the basic principles of functional programming. This will help write better code in multi-paradigm languages. However, to understand and properly apply these principles, the developer will have to adopt what what is called a functional way of thinking.
Another important point is that it is safer to write programs in functional languages because of the lack of side effects. For mathematical calculations and distributed computing, functional code can be shorter than their OOP language counterparts. In addition, some functional languages, such as Erlang, allow developers to change code “on the fly” without rebooting or shutting down the system.
It is important for any developer to know the principles and advantages of all programming paradigms and understand which one is appropriate in each particular case. The advantages of functional programming are suitable for distributed computing and systems with high security and fault tolerance requirements like telecommunication and blockchain networks.
Each paradigm is better suited to solve certain problems, so most advanced systems should use different languages for different tasks. On the other hand, it is just as likely that blockchain programming will rely more on multi-paradigm languages.
The blockchain industry is still just beginning to take advantage of functional programming languages. As this niche matures more projects will use such languages to build distributed networks.