The software development industry has witnessed dramatic shifts in recent years, as trend after trend, from artificial intelligence (AI) to blockchain technology, has emerged. To navigate this constantly evolving landscape, developers must utilize a precise set of tools, techniques, and philosophies to increase efficiency, raise throughput, and lower operational expenses, especially amid the declining economy. In computer programming, this translates to choosing the programming paradigm that produces the best outcomes based on a project’s needs.
Today, the most extensively used programming paradigms include imperative, procedural, declarative, object-oriented, and functional programming. As projects become more complex, programming paradigms encounter additional challenges, such as security issues, susceptibility to errors, limited scalability, lack of reusability, insufficient object-oriented features, and technical disharmony. To solve these and other intractable problems, leading corporations employ functional programming, a math-based software engineering wherein everything is represented as functions.
To better understand the revolutionary contribution of functional programming in software development, it helps to know about the 1980 A.M Turing Award winner Tony Hoare's billion-dollar mistake—null references. A null reference refers to a value saved for denoting that the reference does not point to a valid object. The problem with using this reference is that error ensues most, if not all, of the time. This is to be expected, given that null is not polymorphic with any object, which means any function that conjures it will inevitably break the chain of succeeding calls. Although null seems practical and easy to implement, it has also caused catastrophic failures, from countless bugs and errors to vulnerabilities and system crashes.
In their hunt for the answer on how to solve this billion-dollar mistake and eliminate similar flaws in the system, programmers and developers turned to using purely functional programming languages. Aside from disallowing nulls, functional programming presents numerous advantages. Firstly, functional programming requires immutable data, leaving less room for error and, in turn, software bugs. As a subset of the declarative paradigm, it also improves code readability. Functional programming also enhances code reusability, given that it utilizes pure functions and immutable data. Not only that, but it allows for easy code parallelization, which leads to improved performance.
Functional programming has been around for decades, but it was not until recently that it caught the full attention of industry experts. Although it offers various advantages, many business entities hesitate to use this paradigm because it requires considerable time and effort to learn as it introduces a new method of structuring codes. Platonic.Systems, a leading functional programming consultancy founded in 2018, discards this limitation, as it delivers customized software builds and on-site support designed to put companies ahead of the competition. Founded by Isaac Shapira in 2018, the company provides assistance for research and development organizations, government operations, software startups and enterprises, and financial institutions.
Platonic.Systems helps corporations transform their vision into reality by providing end-to-end, comprehensive software engineering services. Its innovative programming can result in as much as 4x the productivity of traditional software engineering. The consultancy firm also provides staff augmentation support to help companies thrive in the competitive industry.
Essentially, Platonic.Systems contributes to the increased adoption of functional programming in mainstream languages. The founder remarked, "According to Dr. Russell Ackoff, there are four ways to treat a problem: absolution, which entails believing that a problem will solve itself, resolution, which means applying the same solution to the recurring problem, solution, which requires solving issues through research, and finally, dissolution, which involves regarding the system as an entity that can be redesigned in such a way that the problem cannot arise in the future. In Platonic.Systems, we dissolve the problem to ensure that our clients receive only the best outcomes." This innovative approach to software development positions the forward-looking consultancy firm at the forefront of the movement toward an industry that is innovative, efficient, and productive.
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