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Jason Barr
Jason Barr

Posted on • Updated on

Is There a Good JavaScript Tutorial for New Coders that Teaches a Declarative/Functional Style from the Beginning?

Update: I kinda started writing my own

Longtime reader but first-time poster here, so please be gentle. ;)

It seems like every introductory JavaScript tutorial or course I've seen teaches in an imperative style from the get go, and my experience has been that (both for myself and for other learners I've observed) when people start stepping up from basics to looking at actual projects that use more modern coding styles they tend to be lost... not because the project is so far over their heads, but because it tends to use styles they're not familiar with.

I can only think of a few circumstances where I've had to code a for loop by hand in an actual project, for example, but imperative control flow dominates material for beginners.

And maybe it's just me, but I find using, e.g., map to be far more intuitive and less error-prone than doing loops the long way. When I first learned about map I wished I'd been able to use it from the beginning because it just made sense (though, to be fair, when I first started JavaScripting there was no native map method for Arrays).

It seems to me like a JavaScript tutorial or course that teaches building blocks for a more functional style from the beginning would be extremely useful. Are there any out there that are already doing this? I'd love to see some.

I have in mind to possibly try to create something like a JavaScript homage to Simply Scheme by Brian Harvey and Matthew Wright, if you're familiar with it.

Obviously it would need to cover different territory given the more web-focused nature of JS, but that's the basic idea I'm thinking of. Does that make sense?

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