4 ms·

Functional has not much to do with object oriented. Scala for example is both functional and OO. I think you mean the competition between imperative and functio

• aikah 12y ago
  It's not clear where the line is to me.I mean,it's obvious fr Erlang or Haskell.But isnt clojure imperative to some extent? While I understand the notion of pure FP.Shouldnt we say that FP is more of a toolbox that can be used in many languages,some making it easier than others. I mean FP in Java 7 is a pipe-dream while any language that has lambdas can be considered as functional? or should lazy evaluation be another precondition? that's a question.
  • kevinkyyro 12y ago
    It seems practical to say a functional language has first-class functions and a purely functional language has first-class functions and no mutable state -- purely functional -> functional and not imperative. I would identify a language as distinctly imperative if it has mutable state and has statements, e.g. operations with side-effects that have no return values (ex: loops, if's, void methods) -- not to be confused with expressions, which may have side effects, but always have return values. So, if you look at the matrix of possibilities based on these classifications, a language can be any combination of (OO or not OO) and (functional and/or imperative). It is trickier yet when many languages support multiple paradigms but encourage a subset. Or if you choose to restrict functional to require anonymous functions _without_ syntactic sugar. Does that help though?