Discovering Functional Programming Preferences While Implementing Advent of Code in AWK
By
todsacerdoti
Hot, fresh, and worth queueing round the block for.
Summary
The author shares their experience implementing an Advent of Code problem in AWK and discovering their preference for functional programming paradigms. They discuss the limitations of AWK compared to modern functional programming languages, particularly around immutability, lexical scope, and returning arrays from functions. The article explores the author's realization about being 'FP-pilled' (addicted to functional programming concepts) and reflects on programming language design choices.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledI found I'm FP-pilled. I knew I'm addicted to the combination of algebraic data types (tagged unions) and exhaustive pattern matching, but what got me this time was immutability, lexical scope and the basic human right of being allowed to return arrays from functions.
After reading the book The AWK Programming Language (recommended!), I was planning to try AWK out on this year's Advent of Code.
Having some time off from work this week, I tried to implement one of the problems in it to get some practice, set up my tooling, see how hard AWK would be...
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