Monday, October 12, 2009

Functional .Net : First Class Functions

One thing I notice in .Net is that many developers do not think of functions as first class citizens. I guess in the OO world classes or more appropriate the instance representations are the real hero's, however, in my mind, functions deserve much more appreciation than they perhaps get.

Since .Net 1.0 delegates have been around and I still think many developers do not fully understand how they work. I have previously made a post with regard to delegates showing how they can be used in a real world way to save code duplication here. I guess one of the first steps to being comfortable with functional programming is being comfortable with functions as first class citizens; The best way for a typical C# developer to do this is get comfortable with delegates. Before I continue on with my Functional programming journey I want others following with me to be on the same page. Please be sure you understand what a method & delegate are; I feel I describe them reasonably well on the previous mentioned post.

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