Speaking yesterday with my friend Miguel (@miguelcamba), he told me, “hey, take a look at Erlang, it will be very important in the future!” (more or less, because translating our everyday Spanish expressions to English can be almost impossible) I started to think about Erlang and functional programming, because Miguel is some of those early adopters you must trust (also a great friend), here you can find more about him at his blog. The thing is, that while you are reading this, you may be using a laptop, PC, smartphone with a multicore processor, with maybe 2, 4, 8 or more cores inside. So why don’t use that benefits for your enterprise applications? Here is where functional programming comes in action.
New programming languages are appearing like Scala, Clojure, F# and Go, and other ones are coming back like Erlang and Haskell. With all of this in mind, I have decided to give a try to two (for the moment) of this languages, Erlang and Scala, try to build web applications with them and telling you my impressions, making tutorials about them, etc.
So, is it time for functional programming? For me, YES. And in a near future it will be for Enterprise Applications and for our everyday customers too, there are already interesting companies like Whatsapp and Telefónica I+D with very good people like @eSpencer innovating with this techniques. Thanks to one of his tweets, I found a Scala course at Coursera that I will attend.
I am very excited because a new branch in the profession is opening to me. More of this to come, keep tuned!