Today we were lucky to have Bill Schofield from Pivotal Labs speak to the cohort about Functional Programming, and believe you me, I was taking notes!

Instead of going over all the pieces discussed, I updated a presentation slide deck with the following tenets of Functional Programming vs Object Oriented Programming:

FP vs OOP


One particular tenet I learned about today was Referential Transparency.

According to a super useful article about the subject:

Referential transparency means that a function call can be replaced by its value or another referentially transparent call with the same result.

So what does that look like?

  // taking the following example:
  const findBigNums = (arr) => arr.filter(num => num > 3);

  // num > 3 is an evaluation that, if put into it's own function
  const isABigNum = (num) => num > 3;

  //... and can replace the evaluation and can get the same result.
  const findBigNums = (arr) => arr.filter(num => isABigNum(num));

  //... even if the implementation of how you get to that result differs
  const isABigNum = (num) => [3,4,5...1000].include(num);

To learn more about the origin of the term Referential Transparency, check out this article Why do they call it Referentially Transparent? Here are some other articles I found useful: