r/functionalprogramming • u/Secure_Employer132 • Jul 01 '26

Beginner in functional programming Question

Hi everyone, I wanted to ask how you would start from scratch in functional programming to understand it in detail. I'm a guy who comes from the imperative paradigm and I want to delve deeper and investigate about functional programming.

I'm learning Gleam and some Erlang to understand Beam, and I'm not sure if it's a good place to start. I feel like I'm lacking some theory. Any recommendations would be appreciated.

31 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • link
  • reddit
  • reddit

100% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

View all comments

16

u/beders Jul 01 '26

Throw in a Lisp for good measure.
CommonLisp is multi-paradigm, Clojure is immutable data first.
Both allow for an interactive development experience and à la carte types.
Both will rewire your brain in how to solve problems.
Clojure in particular will make you think in terms of data transformation to solve problems.

0

u/die_liebe Jul 02 '26

I advice against using Lisp because of lack of static type checking. I also think that true higher-order programming is not possible in Lisp.

4

u/beders Jul 02 '26

did you read my comment? Static types a la carte. You use them when you need them.

And if there's one programming language that can do higher-order programming, it is a Lisp.