Heroes of Functional Programming

A short list of individuals from whom I’ve learned a great deal about functional programming (and about programming in general).

Fun, Fun, Function

Mattias Petter Johansson aka MPJ has a YouTube video series on functional programming in JavaScript that starts from the very basics.

He covers all sorts of topics on his YouTube channel. He’s on Twitter, too: @mpjme.

Jafar Hussein

Jafar has an excellent 2014 talk on Async JavaScript at Netflix:

He’s on the TC39 committee that oversees the development of the JavaScript (ECMAScript, ES) language. He also teaches the basics of this stuff in a short egghead.io video course.

Scott Sauyet

I found these slides when googling for “functional programming in javascript” (sorry, this embed is wonky on mobile…)

It turns out Scott is the author of Ramda.js - a functional programming toolkit (similar to underscore or lodash but completely centred around FP techniques). It took a while for me to realise what the point of something like Ramda.js is. That brings me to…

Thinking in Ramda by Randy Coulman

Randy gets his own mini-shout out for these excellent articles about Thinking in Ramda. This introduced me to the ideas behind the ‘point free’ style and some of the practical uses for Ramda.js

Dan Abramaov

Inventor of the Redux framework. This freakishly productive developer produces so much open source and now works for Facebook.

And here he is talking a bit about himself, about Redux and React in general. Definitely worth a follow on Twitter.

Dr Boolean’s Prof. Frisbee

Without doubt, my favourite academic hedgehog.

@DrBoolean trolled me once:

That Prof. Frisbee course on Egghead.io really delves into the more theoretical concepts of functional programming within a JavaScript context.

But yes, we should all just learn Haskell.

Written on February 2, 2016