http://bjlkeng.github.io/enTue, 10 Mar 2026 20:54:59 GMTNikola (getnikola.com)http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rsshttp://bjlkeng.github.io/posts/functions-and-procedures/Brian Keng<div><p>I have something to admit: I've never done any serious programming in a functional language. Yes, yes, I've done some small school assignments in <a class="reference external" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_%28programming_language%29">Scheme</a> (a dialect of Lisp), even helping out my friend from another university with his Scheme assignment but nothing <em>real</em> <a class="footnote-reference brackets" href="http://bjlkeng.github.io/posts/functions-and-procedures/#id3" id="id1">1</a>. Does this make me a worse programmer? Probably not, I imagine most developers haven't done anything <em>real</em> with functional programming. Although that's probably not what you'd expect from reading <a class="reference external" href="https://news.ycombinator.com/">Hacker News</a>, where you don't know programming if you haven't tried Clojure or Haskell <a class="footnote-reference brackets" href="http://bjlkeng.github.io/posts/functions-and-procedures/#id4" id="id2">2</a>.</p> <p>My position is much more pragmatic: I'm interested in tools and techniques that help me solve problems faster, cleaner and with less headache. Ideas and concepts from functional programming languages are <em>supposed</em> to help with at least some of that -- and they do; they're just not a panacea for all your programming woes. Like most things a solid grasp of the fundamentals goes a long way. So the topic of this post is about something pretty fundamental: a subroutine. In particular, two important kinds of subroutines: procedures and pure functions.</p> <p><a href="http://bjlkeng.github.io/posts/functions-and-procedures/">Read more…</a> (6 min remaining to read)</p></div>functional programmingfunctionsfundamentalsGreg WardJames Hagueprocedureshttp://bjlkeng.github.io/posts/functions-and-procedures/Sun, 06 Sep 2015 07:04:05 GMT