A simple exercise to see what functional JavaScript would look like, in the form of some simple calculations.

var one = value(1);
var two = value(2);
var three = value(3);
var four = value(4);

// (1 + 2) * 3 - 4 == 5
var resultFunc = subtract(multiply(add(one, two), three), four);

// but it's still a function right now, so evaluate it
var result = resultFunc();
consol.log(result); // => 5

See the specs in the /specs/javascript/ folder for more detail, and the simple function declarations in the public/javascripts/funcalc.js file.

This is really just a thought experiment for me. I'm not very experienced with functional languages. I've played with Haskell a bit, I've done some "functional C#" and "functional Ruby" but it's something that I've never been really familar with. I wanted to try this out to see what it would look like, and to see if I could learn anything from the process and code.

There are some interesting points that stand out:

I've represented everything as a function - even the simple values of 1 through 4. And every function returns a function, except for the simple values, which return their actual value.

In the process of returning functions from functions, I'm effectively representing the state of the application as a series of functions. This one is a bit odd for me to wrap my head around. I'm not sure if this is really correct, or if it's just an oversimplification of what's really happening here.

There are no data-structures, though, only functions. So it stands to reason that the state is stored as a series of functions that can be evaluated to produce a result.

The result isn't actually evaluated until I invoke the resultFunc in the above example. But I have the resultFunc availabe as a variable and I can pass it around anywhere I want. The basically turns it into a command pattern implementation, only in a functional manner instead of an object manner.

All of these functions are side effect free. None of them actually mutates any existing application state. Of course this is some really simple implementation, but that was one of my goals. I'll need to play with some more complex ideas in order to really see how this would play out, though.

I haven't done anything like memoizing or currying for these simple examples, but those are ideas I want to play with, too.

This is really pretty simple stuff... but it's fun to write a simple exercise like this and think about what's going on, why and see how it affects the way I think and approach software development.