Functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing state and mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions to inputs to produce outputs, rather than using imperative statements to change program state, making it easier to understand and predict the behavior of a program.

How to use it in a sentence

• I tried to explain functional programming to my boss, but he just looked at me blankly and said, "Can't you just make the website work like Amazon's?"

• She claimed to be an expert in functional programming, but when I asked her to explain monads, she started rambling about burritos and got escorted out by security.

If you actually want to learn more...

• Programming Bottom-Up: Paul Graham explains the advantages of bottom-up design in Lisp, which encourages creating new operators and evolving the language alongside the program.

• Collection Pipeline: Martin Fowler explores the collection pipeline pattern, commonly used in functional programming, for organizing computations as sequences of operations like filter, map, and reduce.

• Lambda: Fowler discusses lambdas (also known as closures, anonymous functions, or blocks), which are familiar constructs in functional programming languages, allowing the creation of first-class functions.

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