Since we have created a lot of code in our example for this chapter, we will look at the functional programming features of Java, which will help us to delete many lines from our code. The less code we have, the easier it is to maintain the application; thus, programmers love functional programming. But this is not the only reason why functional programming is so popular. It is also an excellent way to describe certain algorithms in a more readable and less error-prone manner than conventional loops.
Functional programming is not a new thing. The mathematical background behind it was developed in the 1930s. One of the first (if not the first) functional programming languages was LISP. It was developed in the 1950s and is still in use, so much so that there is a version of the language implemented on the JVM (Clojure).
Functional programming, in...