Swift and the Legacy of Functional Programming

I&#x27;m curious, does every else find this<p><pre><code> let persons = names .map(Person.init) .filter { $0.isValid } </code></pre> easier to read than this?<p><pre><code> var persons: [Person] = [] for name in names { let person = Person(name: name) if person.isValid { persons.append(person) } } </code></pre> I understand and appreciate the value of compact code, but I find the first one harder to read. A lot of inferred&#x2F;token based coding is harder for me to mentally parse.

Yo, would be nice to have some functional programming language with decent syntax to program apple machines. Let&#x27;s call it Dylan to honor the most recent winner of the Nobel prize for literature.<p>Just kidding. The bottomline of this page and talk is that <i>Swift is still not functional.</i> But you can do cool things with it.

Ask five programmers to define functional programming, get fifteen different answers.

The talk discusses how you can incorporate a few functional techniques (map, filter) but the speaker&#x27;s main goal seems that he wants Swift to be changed to allow for a couple of other functional ideas to be brought into the language.<p>Where&#x27;s the Swift proposal for the enhancements? Product and Sum support? Algebraic data types?

I enjoyed the talk, thank you.<p>The part about &quot;lifting&quot; a type was an &#x27;aha&#x27; moment for me and now I understand!*.<p>I mean, I did this intuitively, but now I know the name of the technique, which is really good.<p>Thank you, I&#x27;ve learned something new today!

There seem to be a lot of &quot;pretend&quot; functional languages around these days. I have recently been engaging with Scala. Having heard and read so much about how it embraces functional style I was kind of shocked to find the number of limitations and practical impediments to actually using it that way. I am starting to wonder if functional programming has finally fallen victim to the same problem that has afflicted all other methodologies - becoming too popular, part of the hype cycle and getting misinterpreted and misapplied everywhere as a consequence.