My favourite approach for this is "compiling to categories" http://conal.net/papers/compiling-to-categories http://conal.net/papers/compiling-to-categories Ess

My favourite approach for this is "compiling to categories" http://conal.net/papers/compiling-to-categories http://conal.net/papers/compiling-to-categories Essentially: lambda calculus (and hence functional programming) can be given many different interpretations; whilst we usually interpret it as a computer program describing some result value, we can also interpret it as a circuit description, and turn it directly into hardware.