Agreed on gentle approach. I've started using libraries like Ramda for JS, which is especially designed to ease people into functional patterns.

I then moved to FP-TS, which makes more heavy use of haskell-like patterns and monads.

The hard part isn't the syntax of whatever language, but understanding the new patterns and way of thinking, which you can do with a simulation layer like FP-TS (for typescript/javascript).

The functional patterns and emphasis on types makes your code robust and more correct. It emphasizes correctness, which is ultimately what your job is as a programmer. Optimization comes after.

> I recommend starting with a gentle approach that doesn't require picking up a new language

Disagree. This is likely to 'dilute' the lessons of functional programming, as it were. If you learn to program in idiomatic Clojure/OCaml/Haskell/Scheme, you can be relatively sure you really have picked up the principles of functional programming.

If you merely attempt to apply new principles in an environment you're already comfortable in, things aren't going to 'click' in the same way.

Beside that, plenty of languages simply lack the facilities needed to effectively use the concepts of FP, as vmchale says.

A gentle way to get into the "functional" mindset is to write small a script and then use it to process some collection with xargs.

xargs is analogous to map() in this situation, and the script needs to have limited side effects to work well with concurrency. xargs -P4 for example.

Functional programming has been a game changer for me as well and has enabled me to write larger and more complex programs that are easy to maintain and reason around. I highly recommend cytoolz for python

> An excellent list. Regarding functional programming, I recommend starting with a gentle approach that doesn't require picking up a new language:

But at least make sure that your language supports closures.

This! What is funny that is that I started doing this before I knew anything at all about functional programming, I just started to avoid stuff that I had painful experiences with.

Later I read a couple of chapter of SICP and then I really changed and my programming hasn't been the same since. The language I use at work is JavaScript and while SICP isn't for JavaScript, nothing else has changed my JavaScript for the better to that degree.

> 1. Stop creating counters/loops and become facile with map, reduce, and the like. This will shift your thinking away from blocks and toward functions.

I am not very comfortable with this. How can I learn to do this in traditionally non-FP languages like Java? (Am CS undergrad student)

> I recommend starting with a gentle approach that doesn't require picking up a new language:

But then you don't get any of the newer stuff.