Functional programming. Some see that term and think "functions? You mean procedural programming. I've been doing that for years." Others see it and think "you mean that crazy academic nonsense that no one understands? Pfft!"

In truth, functional programming is fundamentally an approach to software development, not a particular language or syntax. With modern PHP, it is an approach that is now more readily available and powerful than ever before. Even if you're not writing in Erlang or ML, there is still much to learn from the principles of functional programming to help write better code.

This session will discuss the history of functional programming and how it compares to other programming paradigms (procedural and object-oriented). We will then discuss by example how functional concepts and techniques, plus language capabilities in modern PHP such as anonymous functions can make our code more robust, maintainable, and bug-free. Even without a truly functional language, there is much we can learn from functional programming as a technique.