3 ms·

> whose output only depends on the arguments provided to that function, and nothing else, then you have yourself a functional program You can choose to do this

> whose output only depends on the arguments provided to that function, and nothing else, then you have yourself a functional program You can choose to do this in any language, but that does not make any language conducive to FP. The other main ingredient is that a function should be a primitive data type in the language, and can be stored, re-assigned at run-time, passed to other functions, and returned from functions. Without this, you definitely cannot have a functional language.

fnordsensei 10y ago
Right! I didn't know that it would have to be a primitive in the language, and would have thought that functional programming was more of a methodology than a technology. Wikipedia[1] seems to think that functional programming is a subset of declarative programming. It would be interesting to see a table, or possibly a decision tree, of possible language design choices to see the different parameters by which a language can vary. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming
- hellofunk 10y ago
  FP is not a methodology alone. It requires language support. Some languages support it better than others. Some are clearly and only functional, others offer many functional features but not the whole package. Also, the degree that a language needs to support certain features to be called functional varies among developers. Some languages are very clearly not functional in any way, while others, like C++ since 2011, offer a lot of functional features but do not offer the same paradigms that languages like Clojure and Haskell offer. That's because the other "primitive" a language should support to be fully functional are persistent data structures that can be bashed on by numerous functions without performance cost. Such structures don't exist yet for C++ (though many have tried, and they might eventually), but are the core of Haskell and Clojure.

fnordsensei 10y ago

Right! I didn't know that it would have to be a primitive in the language, and would have thought that functional programming was more of a methodology than a technology. Wikipedia[1] seems to think that functional programming is a subset of declarative programming. It would be interesting to see a table, or possibly a decision tree, of possible language design choices to see the different parameters by which a language can vary. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming

hellofunk 10y ago
FP is not a methodology alone. It requires language support. Some languages support it better than others. Some are clearly and only functional, others offer many functional features but not the whole package. Also, the degree that a language needs to support certain features to be called functional varies among developers. Some languages are very clearly not functional in any way, while others, like C++ since 2011, offer a lot of functional features but do not offer the same paradigms that languages like Clojure and Haskell offer. That's because the other "primitive" a language should support to be fully functional are persistent data structures that can be bashed on by numerous functions without performance cost. Such structures don't exist yet for C++ (though many have tried, and they might eventually), but are the core of Haskell and Clojure.