[erlang-questions] Conceptual questions on architecture of functional programs

[黃耀賢 (Yau-Hsien Huang)]

Hi, Silas.

There's an introductory paper "Why Functional Programming Matters" for you.

In functional fashion, you can make second-order, third-order and n-th-order
functions
when you pass a name of a first-order function into some function.


-- 

Best Regards.

--- Y-H. H.


On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Silas Silva <silasdb@REDACTED> wrote:

> Hi all!
>
> After asking conceptual questions about distributed NoSQL databases, it
> is time for a more newbie question, about functional programming.
>
> There is some years I do fine OO and imperative programming.  I needed
> to learn some functional programming.  So I decided to start a basic
> commercial application (customer, orders, etc.) in Erlang to learn
> something about it.  After some time, I realized my program had the
> following structure:
>
>
> - model.erl -> basic functional to access Mnesia database
> - layer.erl -> an abstraction layer between model and front-end.
>  Controller?
> - frontend.erl -> show a front-end for the user, for now HTTP in
>  Mochiweb.  Latter, a GUI.
>
>
> So, from fron-end I use layer functions, that use model functions.
>
> So I realized I wasn't actually doing any functional programming.  This
> could be an architecture of a C program using high-level code.  I did
> sequential programming split in dozens of mini-functions and I believed
> that this was functional programming (a C-like program with high-level
> constructors)...
>
> In OO, I would easily return an object from layer, call its methods to
> get what I wanted and make heavy use of encapsulation in objects.  I
> could also pass objects in and out.
>
> In the program I just wrote, I pass in and out records, that are not
> that different from passing C structures in and out.
>
> So, my question is:  where is my mistake?  What about a reference (book,
> tutorial whatever) about functional programming architecture for OO
> programmers (or imperative programmers)?  "Programming Erlang Software
> for a Concurrent World", by Joe Armstrong is great, but it is more about
> the language itself than functional programming techniques.  "Practical
> Common Lisp", by Peter Seibel is more worth to read.
>
> Other references are found in
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/89212/functional-programming-architecture
>
> Any tips about that?
>
> Thanks!
>
> P.S: The above program don't have any concurrent code yet.  I know it is
> really important for Erlang, but would it be really that necessary to
> get function programming feeling?
>
> --
> Silas Silva
>
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