Recap of "Functional Programming" talk at Triangle JS/PHP/MySQL Meetup

Last night I had the pleasure of giving a talk on 'Functional Programming' techniques in JavaScript and PHP with an emphasis on the popular libraries underscore.js and underscore.php. The event was the annual joint gathering of the TriangleJS and Triangle PHP/MySQL Meetups.

We started out with some coverage of why functional programming is compelling to learn and what exactly it is. Functional programming, at its roots, is the idea that functions are values so they can be assigned to variables, passed to other functions as arguments, and returned from functions as return values. We looked at some examples of each which are best illustrated in the slide deck linked and embedded below. We hit on some of the facilities provided by the underscore library. Finally, the conclusion of the talk was a live coding session (with only one syntactical error! thank the Live Coding Gods) where we started fleshing out a little, functional SQL-like DSL for querying data in-memory.

Overall it was a great time and I really appreciate the TriJS / TriPHP&MySQL groups for putting the event together!

Slides are available on SpeakerDeck. Demo code is available on GitHub.