Why functional programming matters to me

Abstract

Functional programming advocates a style of programming in which the programmer seeks to find a sufficiently small, yet powerful, set of abstractions that capture an entire class of problems, and use these abstractions to solve a concrete problem. I illustrate this by means of a case study in which I implement the game Trax. In this turn-based game two players attempt to create either a closed loop of a line of their own color, or make the line connect opposite ends of a tile set of some prescribed minimal dimensions. Trax is an attractive case because it has interesting computational problems, for which I use classical functional techniques, but also because it is a distributed multi-user application, for which I use the more recently developed iTask formalism. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.