The Howdy Glossary

Functional Programming (FP) is a paradigm that emphasizes using mathematical functions to define program logic without altering state or employing mutable data structures. Pure functions, which rely solely on input parameters and produce no side effects, are integral to FP. The paradigm favors recursion over traditional loops and utilizes higher-order functions that accept or return other functions, enabling versatile operations like map, reduce, and filter. Prominent FP languages include Haskell, Scala, F#, Clojure, Erlang (a concurrent language), Elixir (operating on the Erlang VM), and Standard ML of New Jersey.

The origins of functional programming trace back to mathematics and lambda calculus introduced by Alonzo Church in the 1930s. Lambda calculus significantly influenced the development of functional programming languages. John McCarthy’s creation of Lisp in the late 1950s was another milestone advancing this paradigm. Over subsequent decades, numerous researchers contributed to refining and popularizing functional programming languages such as Haskell, Scala, and Clojure. These efforts have resulted in a family of languages designed for more concise, expressive coding well-suited for concurrency and parallelism challenges.

Functional programming offers distinct advantages compared to object-oriented programming (OOP). FP's core philosophy focuses on immutability and pure functions leading to code that is often easier to reason about and test due to its predictability. In contrast with OOP's emphasis on objects' interactions involving mutable states, FP promotes declarative coding styles enhancing scalability through better modularity facilitated by higher-order functions. Additionally, recursion as an alternative to loops provides elegant solutions for repetitive tasks while minimizing side-effect-related bugs common in shared mutable states seen in OOP environments like Java or Python; thus making FP ideal for domains requiring robust concurrency handling such as distributed computing systems.