Functional Programming With (or Without) Java Streams: A Case Study

As a Language, Java has evolved to incorporate gradually more functional programming (FP) features. For instance, the old "switch" statement, inherited from C, is slowly turning into a full-fledged pattern-matching expression, as could be found in a truly FP language. Most notably, streams (combined with lambda expressions) are sometimes hailed as having brought FP to Java. It is true as far as simple illustrations go: using streams, you can now square all the numbers in a list with "map(x -> x * x)". But real applications need more than squaring numbers. What happens then? In this talk, I will describe several attempts at implementing a classic FP strategy using Java code. In particular, I will show how well (or not) streams fit the needs of the program, and what alternatives can be used. The talk will be Java-centric with plenty of code (available on GitHub).

Speaker:

Prof. Michel Charpentier is an associate professor with the Computer Science department at the University of New Hampshire. His interests over the years have ranged from distributed systems, formal verification and mobile sensor networks. He has been with UNH since 1999 and currently teaches courses in programming languages, concurrency, formal verification and model-checking. His new book is Functional and Concurrent Programming: Core Concepts and Features (Addison-Wesley 2023).

Note:

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