My journey to functional programming

I’m starting to write again, and my writings are likely to be very much on a theme - OCaml (and other FP languages), and this inaugural entry explains why they fascinate me.

I’ve worked as a software engineer, and latterly a systems architect, for the last decade or so. In the process I’ve used many, many languages - from my hobbyist days with Pascal, Basic, C/C++, through to PHP, C.NET, Java, Python, Javascript, Go, and a little Ruby. I even worked almost exclusive on mobile apps, when that was a thing, with Objective C and Java on Android. Perhaps it’s unusual to have worked with so many technologies, but there’s perhaps one language that changed my viewpoint on everything, clichéd as it is – Lisp.

More specifically, I was introduced to Clojure. I’d heard about functional programming, and felt I’d dabbled a bit using Linq in .NET. I’d tried...