Comment by nicklecompte
5 years ago
As someone who almost exclusively uses functional languages: don’t do this. This kind of pedantic gatekeeping is not only obnoxious... it’s totally inaccurate! Which makes it 100x as obnoxious.
“Functional” means “functions are first-class citizens in the language” and typically mean a lot of core language features designed around easily creasing android manipulating functions as ordinary objects (so C#, C++, and Python don’t really count, even with more recent bells-and-whistles). Typically there is a strong emphasis on recursive definitions. But trying to pretend “functional programming languages” are anything particularly specific is just a recipe for dumb arguments. And of course, outside of the entry point itself, it is quite possible (even desirable) to write side-effect-free idiomatic ISO C.
The “original” functional language was LISP, which is impure as C and not even statically-typed - and for a long time certain Lisp/Scheme folks would gatekeep about how a language wasn’t a Real Functional Language if it wasn’t homoiconic and didn’t have fancy macros. (And what’s with those weird ivory tower Miranda programmers?) In fact, I think the “gate has swung,” so to speak, to the point that people downplay the certain advantages of Lisps over ML/Haskells/etc.
> for a long time certain Lisp/Scheme folks would gatekeep about how a language wasn’t a Real Functional Language if it wasn’t homoiconic and didn’t have fancy macros
This never happened. You are confusing functional with the 2000s "X is a good enough Lisp" controversy, which had nothing to do with functional programming.
> “Functional” means “functions are first-class citizens in the language”
No, the word function has a clearly defined meaning. I don't know where you get your strange ideas from - you need to look at original sources. The word "functional" did not become part of the jargon until the 1990s. Even into the 1980s most people referred to this paradigm as "applicative" (as in procedure application), which is a lot more appropriate. The big problem with the Lisp community is that early on, when everyone used the words "procedures" or "subroutines," they decided to start calling them "functions," even though they could have side effects. This is probably the reason why people started trying to appropriate "functional" as an adjective from the ML and Haskell communities into their own languages. A lot of people assume that if you can write a for loop as a map, it makes it "functional." What you end up with is a bunch of inappropriate cargo-culting by people who do not understand the basics of functional programming.
Term "functional" has been watered down and has different meanings now. However, the original meaning comes from mathematics and is still in use. You might not like it, but that's how it is - hence why I deliberately disambiguated it in my response to make it clear.
This has also nothing to do with gatekeeping.
If you disagree with me, maybe you should go to Wikipedia first and change it there, because by what you say, Wikipedia does it wrong too.
> In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming
And functions links to:
> The subroutine may return a computed value to its caller (its return value), or provide various result values or output parameters. Indeed, a common use of subroutines is to implement mathematical functions, in which the purpose of the subroutine is purely to compute one or more results whose values are entirely determined by the arguments passed to the subroutine. (Examples might include computing the logarithm of a number or the determinant of a matrix.) This type is called a function.
> In programming languages such as C, C++, and C#, subroutines may also simply be called functions (not to be confused with mathematical functions or functional programming, which are different concepts).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subroutine