Functional SOLID

Robert Martin assembled the SOLID family of principles to provide a useful guide to help us create object-oriented software designs that were resilient in the face of change. In recent years, the need to write highly-concurrent software in order to leverage increasingly ubiquitous multicore architectures, as well as general interest in more effectively controlling complexity in large software designs, has driven a renewed interest in the functional programming paradigm. Given the apparent similarity in their goals, “What is the intersection of SOLID with functional programming?” is a natural question to ask.

In this talk, we'll explore this intersection. We'll begin with a tour of the evolutionary patterns associated with enterprise software and programming paradigms, as well as take a look at the ongoing quest for best practices, the goal being to elucidate the motivation for examining this intersection of SOLID and functional programming. We'll then walk through each of the SOLID principles, examining them in their original object-oriented context, and looking at example problems and solutions using the Java language. Then for each principle, we'll examine its possible intersection with the functional programming paradigm, and explore the same problems and solutions using the Clojure language. We'll close by examining the transcendent qualities of the SOLID principles and how they can make any design simpler, regardless of the programming paradigm employed.