Composable Functional JavaScript

Intro

Notes and solutions for the Composable Functional JavaScript free course on Egghead by the most excellent Brian Lonsdorf (a.k.a DrBoolean).

Related material from the same author is the Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming. This Dev How To project/site has a section with solutions and extra notes on that (awesome and free) book. Check it out!

My notes and examples sometimes use a few helper functions that either I created or that I extracted from a video lesson into a reusable function. If you are reading a page and it seems there is no definition for a certain function, check the Helper Functions page.

A Note on Extra Examples and Deviations From The Videos

While studying this content myself and creating these notes and the unit tests, I sometimes change the original code a little bit, or add extra notes on “flaws” in his code and propose a different, “better” solution.

Or course Brian Lonsdorf (the author of the original content and the videos) knows about all these things. He probably just wanted to focus on the main ideas, without digressions and to keep the code short and easy to read.

Since we are writing notes and explanations from the videos in text on a web page, adding unit tests and sometimes showing different alternatives, we are OK with adding additional explanations on tangential topics, like in this case, in which we add extra, further information on basic JavaScript.

One such example of this happening is on Video 05, concatUniq() imperative style.

A Note on the Wording Used

The explanations (my explantions and notes on the content of the videos) at times use wording like “beginner-like approach”, or “this implementation is too much procedural”, or “too much object-oriented”, etc.

The intent is not to deride beginners [1] or to imply that other programming paradigms are bad [2]. The focus here is on functional programming. We strive for a functional style as much as possible since the goal is to learn and practice this specific programming paradigm. So, when something does not conform to the principles of FP, we occasionally make such comparisons and comments as a means to show how much the given implementation is non-conformant, or how far away it is to the functional paradigm.

Also, if beginners tend to do things in a certain way, that is OK. The goal is to keep learning and improving. If the procedural, or the object-oriented, or functional programming style have such and such pros and cons, that is OK too [3]. Again, the goal is to learn so we can offer more educated opinions and make more informed decisions in any given situation [4].

Composable Functional JavaScript