80: 'Hardcore' Functional Programming using Ramda with Andrew D'Amelio

What this episode covers

In this week’s show we are lucky to be joined by Andrew D’Amelio, to discuss all things Ramda and ‘Hardcore’ Functional Programming. We start off discussion with how he got into programming, growing up with lecturers telling him that JavaScript was just a flash in the pan. Leading on from this we delve into how he quit his previous job to take 6 months off, investing time into learning AngularJS due to its heavy job demand. Throughout this time he was able to learn a lot from the Frontend Masters courses, with aid from AngularJS’s opinionated approach. We then move on to discuss the philosophy behind Ramda, introduced to him within the Hardcore Functional Programming course provided by Frontend Masters - and how it promotes code reuse by way of composition. This interest into the library brought him to introduce it to colleagues in a lunch n’ learn, paving the way for deployment into production. Andrew then highlights how it performed in production, along with his experiences debugging code written with it. Finally, we finish off the show touching upon type transformations and how his current workplace are using TypeScript and Flow to harness typing. We then conclude on how Ramda is a great gateway into many advanced functional concepts, using a language that feels ‘safe’ as opposed to taking an even bigger dive into Haskell and Lisp dialects.

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