Author: James Norton

In the previous installment of our introduction to functional programming we looked at reading values from nested data structures.nIn this final post we look at the flip side of working with nested data structures, updating them. If you have not read the previous post yet and are not familiar Elixir, you might want to read…

In the last post we looked at functional approaches to solving problems typically solved using loops in imperative languages. These problems centered around list-like data structures such as arrays or vectors. In this post we will look at more complicated nested data structures.

This is the first post in a series dedicated to presenting solutions to common challenges that developers encounter when moving from an imperative programming approach to functional programming (FP). I will present a series of problems and provide solutions in both Java and Elixir, a functional language running on the Erlang VM.

By now you have probably heard all the hype about functional programming (FP) and may have even dipped your toe in the water by trying out one of the other Lisp dialects. Maybe you have experimented with some of the functional elements of Scala, Ruby, Python, or one of the newer languages.

When working with spatial data one often needs to work with polygons to demarcate bounding areas. One important concept related to this is winding, which defines the relative order in which the vertex points of a polygon are listed. Winding can be either clockwise (CW) or counter-clockwise (anti-clockwise) (CCW), referring to the direction in which…

One common functionality for software is the need to provide human readable text messages. This is true of native applications, web applications, and many back-end systems. For applications with a user interface there is often a requirement that these messages be localized, that is, provided to the user in the user’s native language.