I am planning to participate in Advent of Code this year. For those not familiar with it, it's a daily coding challenge that runs through December, until Christmas. Mostly it's just for fun, but some people take it as an opportunity to either push themselves (by solving the puzzles in a language they're unfamiliar with) or to show off some feature of a language they like, which they then blog about.
In my case, I'll be solving puzzles in PHP, of course, but specifically using functional techniques. My goal is to demonstrate how functional programming in PHP is not just viable but creates really nice solutions. At least, I hope it works out that way; I haven't seen any of the challenges yet. :-)
I will be using the just-released PHP 8.1, because it's a really nice release that I am already in love with. I will also be either using or extending a small functional library I've built recently to support my own projects, Crell/fp. Mostly it's built to support pipe operations, by providing a user-space pipe() function (since a syntactic one sadly didn't get accepted to PHP itself) and a series of functions that return closures in order to play nicely with it.
A secondary goal of this endeavor is to help flesh out that utility library more. :-) (It doesn't even have any common monads yet, like Either, which I expect I'll end up making along the way somehow.)
Each day, I will blog my PHP solution to the problem to share with the rest of the community in the hopes that it will be educational. At least, each day until I decide I can't keep up with it. We'll see how long I last...
Let the coding commence!
Want to know more about functional programming and PHP? Read the whole book on the topic: Thinking Functionally in PHP.
