Understanding functional programming
Functional programming is a paradigm that has gained popularity. It is not new; we can trace its roots back to Lambda calculus, which was introduced in the 1930s. In the 1950s, the programming language Lisp was developed and implemented this paradigm.
As we will see, this paradigm has a very different approach to how programs are structured and implemented. You will need to rethink the way you look at programming and code structure to be able to understand the strength of this paradigm.
We will begin by looking at a definition of functional programming. The definition will, itself, be hard to understand, so we will also need to look at some parts of it to understand what this is all about.
One definition is as follows:
"Functional programming is a way of structuring a computer program that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing the state of the program and the use of mutable data."...
