I can enumerate many features of functional programming, but when my friend asked me Could you define functional programming for me? I couldn’t.
I can enumerate many features of functional programming, but when my friend asked me
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I can enumerate many features of functional programming, but when my friend asked me Could you define functional programming for me? I couldn’t.
I would say that the defining point of pure functional programming is that all computation is done in functions with no side effects. That is, functions take inputs and return values, but do not change any hidden state, In this paradigm, functions more closely model their mathematical cousins.
This was nailed down for me when I started playing with Erlang, a language with a write-once stack. However, it should be clarified that there is a difference between a programming paradigm, and a programming language. Languages that are generally referred to as functional provide a number of features that encourage or enforce the functional paradigm (e.g., Erlang with it’s write-once stack, higher order functions, closures, etc.). However the functional programming paradigm can be applied in many languages (with varying degrees of pain).