Topics include specifications and invariants; testing, test-case generation, and coverage; abstract data types and representation independence; design patterns for object-oriented programming; concurrent programming, including message passing and shared concurrency, and defending against races and deadlock; and functional programming with immutable data and higher-order functions.
Topics include specifications and invariants; testing, test-case generation, and coverage; abstract data types and representation independence; design patterns for object-oriented programming; concurrent programming, including message passing and shared memory concurrency, and defending against races and deadlock; and functional programming with immutable data and higher-order functions.
Clojure is a Lisp variant that encourages a functional style of programming by providing immutable data structures, functions as first-class objects and uses recursive iteration as opposed to state-based looping (Hickey, 2008).
One programming paradigm that greatly facilitates writing referentially transparent functions and using immutable data structures is the one of functional programming.
We studied the aspects and benefits of functional programming in cheminformatics by first designing an immutable data structure for representing molecules and then implementing a SMILES parser in accordance with the OpenSMILES specification [21].
We present our initial results with functional programming in chemistry by first describing an immutable data structure for molecular graphs together with a couple of simple algorithms to calculate basic molecular properties before writing a complete SMILES parser in accordance with the OpenSMILES specification.
In its purest form, functional programming removes the need for variable assignment by using immutable data structures that eliminate the use of state and side effects (Backus, 1978).
Scala is not a pure functional programming language that enforces referential transparency through its type system (this can be achieved by using the effect system provided by scalaz though; see below), but programming in a pure manner as well as the use of immutable data structures are strongly encouraged and facilitated by the language.
Since functional programming languages were designed with referential transparency in mind, these languages offer a lot of support when writing immutable data structures and side-effects free code.
Immutable data structures are the answer.
That's why ImmutableJS, for example, sticks to a more object-based style of interacting with immutable data.
