Summary
By now, you should have a more comprehensive grasp of functional programming, its advantages, and how Kotlin tackles this paradigm. We’ve explored the ideas of immutability and pure functions, and how their integration leads to code that’s both easier to test and maintain. Of course, nothing comes without some trade-offs. One significant drawback is that it can lead to performance issues in some scenarios due to the creation of numerous intermediate objects and the potential for increased memory usage.
Additionally, the paradigm shift from imperative programming requires a learning curve and can be challenging to integrate with imperative codebases.
We covered how Kotlin supports closures, allowing a function to access variables from its surrounding function and thus preserve state between multiple runs. This facilitates techniques like currying and memoization, which enable us to set default function arguments and cache previously computed function...