TouchDevelop: Pushing the design envelope with Functional Programming

Although TouchDevelop isn’t well received by many “advanced” programmers, it is a sophisticated design tool that operates entirely in the cloud.  This means that you can use TouchDevelop on any platforms and generate Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 apps quickly and easily.  Being completely in the cloud and entirely focused on Touch enabled and mobile devices is pretty much a first. 

To use TouchDevelop you will need to rip out the object-oriented thinking that you are accustom to and begin to think functional programming.  This does not mean that Object-Oriented programming is dead, after all NSA needs more research to be done on Object Oriented programming.  But functional programming pre-dates Object-Oriented programming, older programs like FORTRAN and so forth are functional.

One of the issues that confuse people who only have used Object Oriented programming versus Functional programming is that usually Object Oriented programming requires a great deal of design and time, also money.  Usually functional programming is designed to be fast, cheap and solve specific problems.  Usually Object Oriented programs are solutions looking for problems and Functional Programming responds to problems, quickly.

With the highly collaborative capabilities of TouchDevelop, a team can easily set up a group and use libraries to share work across the team.

To get started go to https://www.touchdevelop.com and log in with gmail, yahoo, Microsoft, or Facebook

You can sign in with any of these identity server. To find out more about identity servers see: https://yourid.intel.com/identityui
Use the interactive tutorial to learn how to program with TouchDevelop. The only issue is that the interactive tutorials make it seem so easy.  It is, but often when people use the interactive tutorials they don’t get that they need to observe what they are doing.
Here is where your scipts will appear here as you work on them.