Clojure é o início de uma revolução na programação funcional?

Is Clojure the start of a revolution in functional programming?

Clojure is a dialect of LISP that runs on the JVM and whose statistics tell a very compelling story about the future of functional programming and software development.

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35% use it because they like the “Lispiness” of the language, which is a great alternative to the general verbosity of Java.

This data is in line with anecdotal reports. People who try Clojure do so out of a desire to find better ways to handle the development process, especially people who work with Java . In essence, these are developers who have seen the flaw in OOP and are looking for alternatives.

Where is Clojure used?

Clojure is known as the backend language of Nubank do Brasil, the largest digital bank in the world. According to the latest statistics, around 700 Clojure developers are part of the Nubank development team.

Clojure is primarily used for financial services and enterprise software, with steady adoption in both the healthcare sector and retail markets.

The language is a strong solution for large and small scale businesses. But the majority of its user bases are start-ups. This is logical, as it is easier to start creating solutions from scratch than having to migrate previous work.

Why functional programming?

Proponents of functional programming believe that their approach creates code that is cleaner, easier to maintain, and requires less debugging.

For example, if you need to transform an uppercase “A” into a lowercase “a”, you write a function that takes “A” and outputs an “a”. You don't change the original data, you just use it to generate something else. This avoids the problem of inadvertently transforming your data, which can create problems in the future.

This is one of the many advantages of a functional programming paradigm. Is it a replacement for OOP? I don't think so, but it is undeniable that functional programming is gaining followers every day.

The senior developers who made the change will bring in junior developers and teach them about this approach. It's a ripple effect, which I believe will popularize this approach in the future.

I don't think OOP will be dethroned anytime soon, but having a larger toolkit for solving problems is always a welcome addition to any discipline. Software Development included.

Source: BairesDev

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