Functional Programming in C++

Controlling complexity is one of the biggest challenges a developer faces. To confront this challenge the human being uses abstraction as a tool to manage it. On another side, abstraction reflects a way of thinking, a personal view of the problem and its enclosing environment. This view is not unique and can greatly influence the complexity of the solution. As an example, in astronomy, the movement models of the planets has been extraordinary complex and difficult to apprehend in a geocentric model of the univers. Once this paradigm shifted to an heliocentric one the related models were easy and much more affordable to solve and predict. In the same way, in computer science there are several programming paradigms that influence the resulting arquitectures and design of proposed solutions to a given problem. Knowing different paradigms is an enrichment to the developper that can approach an specific problem in different ways.

Functional programming is a fundamental software paradigm. Its roots emanate directly from one of the two equivalent computation theories that sustain this field. Recently functional programming has become more popular once the Moore's law is reaching its limits. New programming languages has emerged from this paradigm, and traditional ones has seen how they have added features originated from the functional domain. C++ has not been an exception and the trends are that more features will be incorporated. Knowning its components and how to manage them will help you increase your productivity by teaching how can a problem can be addressed. Write functional C++ code that is easy to understand, test and reuse.

The presenter will show how to think functionally and solve everyday programming problems in an elegant way. We will see what tools the C++ language provides to code in a functional way. And finally we will see which related additions are in the queue to be incorporated in futures standards.

Fucntional programming is not only easy, valuable, and helpful but essentially fun.