Skip to main content

Functional programming in Java 8


In my previous post, we discussed about why we should consider to use functional programming. Now, let's delve into what functional programming in Java is.

What is pure functional programming?

Shortly, functional programming is programming using functions. A function corresponds to a mathematical function such as log, sin. Basically, it takes zero or more arguments, give one or more result, and has no side effects.

We can't completely program in pure functional style in Java

Why?  For example, calling Scanner.nextLine twice typically gives different result.

So, it's just called "functional-style programming". How is that?
- There is no mutating structures visible to callers. That means your side effect may not be visible to a program, but it's visible to the programmer in terms of slower execution.
- A function or method shouldn't throw any exceptions (follows the concept "pass arguments, return result"). We can use types like Optional<T> instead.
- For pragmatic reasons, we can accept some code that can't be strictly described as functional, e.g: some form of log file.

We call it "no visible side effects" or referential transparency

With functional-style programming, we follow the rule "no visible side-effects" includes no mutating structures visible to callers, no I/O and no exceptions. This concept is called "referential transparency". A function is referentially transparent if it always returns the same result value when called with the same argument value. For example, "huong".replace("h", "H") but Random.nextInt

Will function-style programming replace object-oriented programming?

Why? And, why not? These are just programming styles. It depends!
In practice, Java programmers have always mixed object-oriented and functional-style programming styles.
- Object-oriented programming style: everything is an object and programs operate by updating fields and calling methods that update their associated object.
- Functional-style programming style: referential transparency. It helps enable you to write programs that are more modular and more suitable for multicore processors. These ideas are as additional weapons in your programming armory.

Reference

Image result for java 8 in action

[1]. Alan Mycroft and Mario Fusco, Java 8 in Action: Lambdas, Streams, and Functional-style Programming. Part 4. Beyond Java 8.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Make simple music program with beep(freq, duration) with Pascal

Pascal is my first programing language when I have studied in high school. It was really exciting for me. :) The Pascal programming language was created by Niklaus Wirth in 1970. It was named after Blaise Pascal, a famous French Mathematician. It was made as a language to teach programming and to be reliable and efficient. Pascal has since become more than just an academic language and is now used commercially . I tried to make a simple music program by using Lazarus IDE on MS Window 7, 64-bit. It frustrated me a few times how difficulty to use Sound command to make a sound. Sound did not work on my compiler and my platform anymore. So far, I just could use beep(freq, duration) from window unit to implement my work. Here is my code. ;) program mysong; uses Windows, crt; const C: Integer = 512; { x = A * EXP(LN(2)/12)} C_: Integer = 542; D: Integer = 574; D_: Integer = 608; E: Integer = 644; F: Integer = 682; F_: Integer = 723; G: Integer = ...

Installing NGINX on macOS

I have heard of a lot of NGINX recently. One of them was it can help for security issues; for sure, it much be more. It so happens that our team has got a ton of user stories from a security audit. It's time to delve into it. What is NGINX? In order to get a basic idea and have some fun , I've just picked some available posts from my favorite Vietnamese blogger communities as below: https://kipalog.com/posts/Cau-hinh-nginx-co-ban---Phan-1 https://viblo.asia/hoang.thi.tuan.dung/posts/ZabG912QGzY6 NGINX (pronounce: Engine-X) is a web server (comparing to IIS, Apache). It can be used as a reverse proxy ( this is what I need for security issues with configuration ), load balancer and more. How to get started? I found the below path for learning NGINX by googling "learn nginx": https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-online-resources-to-learn-Nginx In this post, I only went first step. This is installing NGINX on macOS and taking a first look at the confi...

Styling Sort Icons Using Font Awesome for Primefaces' Data Table

So far, Primefaces has used image sprites for displaying the sort icons. This leads to a problem if we want to make a different style for these icons; for example, I would make the icon "arrow up" more blurry at the first time the table loading because I want to highlight the icon "arrow down". I found a way that I can replace these icons with Font Awesome icons. We will use "CSS Pseudo-classes" to achieve it. The hardest thing here is that we should handle displaying icons in different cases. There is a case both "arrow up" and "arrow down" showing and other case is only one of these icons is shown. .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s { background-image: none; margin-left: 5px; font-size: 1.1666em; position: relative; } .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s:not(.ui-icon-triangle-1-s)::before { content: "\f106"; font-family: "FontAwesome"; position: ...

Using Drools to Dynamically Manipulate Metadata of JSF Components

The post is just an approach to change metadata (e.g maxlength, required, etc) of JSF components (e.g. inputText, selectOneMenue, etc) by Drools. Project structure Tools being used Java version 1.8.0_131 Apache Maven 3.5.0 Apache Tomcat 8.0.16 Don't forget to configure your confidential information on  these following files: pom.xml, settings.xml (Maven) and tomcat-users.xml (Tomcat). For example: Source code https://github.com/vnnvanhuong/java_lab/tree/master/jsfdrools

Java Core - Top 10 Questions Every Developer Should Know

#RandomlyPickedByMe What is the difference between Javascript and Java? Difference between StringBuilder and StringBuffer? Why do I get "SomeType@a3fde" when I print my code? Why is String immutable? Why "equals" method when we have "==" operator? Is List<Dog> a subclass of List<Animal>? Why shouldn't we use raw type? Is Java “pass-by-reference” or “pass-by-value”? What's the advantage of a Java enum versus a class with public static final fields? Why "double x = 0.1 + 0.2" and result of print(x) is 0.30000000000000004? 1. What is the difference between Javascript and Java? Holy crap! (Vietnamese: Thế quái nào lại có câu hỏi ngớ ngẩn vậy chứ?) "Java and Javascript are similar like Car and Carpet are similar." - Greg Hewgill (on StackOverflow) 2. Difference between StringBuilder and StringBuffer String is immutable. StringBuilder and StringBuffer are mutable. StringBuffer is thread-safe. String...