Play With sciBASIC

About this book

The series of articles in this book is designed to adjust your way of thinking to functional thinking, so that you can think about common problems in a new perspective and improve your daily coding work. This series describes the concept of functional programming, the framework of functional programming running in the VisualBasic language, functional programming languages running on the CLR, and some directions for the future of language design. This series is primarily geared towards understanding the way VisualBasic and its abstract tiers work, but developers who lack experience in functional language use.

In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm—a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs—that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing-state and mutable data. It is a declarative programming paradigm, which means programming is done with expressions or declarations instead of statements.1

A Metaphor picked from IBM developerworks

假如您是位伐木工人，如果您拥有最好的斧子，那您将会是林场中最能干的伐木工人。忽然有一天，有人向您展示并推荐一个新型伐木工具，电锯。这个销售人员很善于推销，于是您购买了电锯，但不知道如何使用。于是您就参照以前的模式来用，举起电锯用力地挥向树木。您很快就会得出结论，电锯这种新工具只不过是一种时尚，最后还是改用斧子来砍树。这时，有人过来告诉您如何正确使用电锯。 您可以参考这个故事，但是要把电锯 替换为函数式编程。这是个全新的编程范式，并不像学习一门新语言那么简单。毕竟，语言语法只是细节问题。难点在于学习不同的思维 方式。这就是我的切入点 — 电锯使用者与函数式程序员。2

Features for Functional Programming

The VisualBasic language doing support for the Functional Programming as better as its fully support on the OOP or Imperative Programming. And in my opinion, the VisualBasic have some great language feature which makes powerful supports for the Functional Programming, and here in this book I want to talking about the Functional Programming style in VisualBasic from these language features:

  1. Standard Module
  2. Extension Method & Pipeline
  3. Lambda Expression
  4. Generic
  5. Operator Overrides & Natural Programming
  6. Linq & Parallel
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming ↩
2. https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cn/java/j-ft1/index.html ↩
3. https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cn/java/j-ft20/ ↩