this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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Functional programming means that you structure your code in a manner of functions that take arguments and return values based on the functions logic.
This is in sharp contrast to procedural programming which shares a global state to access and mutate.
Well it makes testing very different and also the act of accessing and changing data in the global scope can cause much havoc as a programmer always need to have the entire program in mind and not just the function they are working on.
That's the sharp contrast e.g. it makes organising and working on code bases easier.
That's because simple examples don't really highlight the difference.
Functional programming is completely different from procedural programming at many levels. Not just the code, syntax and program flow, but also the way it's compiled and executed. But I'd go further than that and say it's like a different way of thinking about what programming actually is.
When people say it's a different paradigm, that's exactly what it is.
For example I do a lot of stuff in OpenSCAD, which is a functional programming language to generate 3D models. What only sunk into me as I used it more was how the entire program is a single mathematical formula. We all know the y = 2 + 3x from school and with functional programming, that's exactly what you are doing. But y is the 3D model and x is the input parameters. And once that penny drops it all falls into place.
Another place I've used functional programming a lot if when programming Digital Signal Processors (DSPs). There is a continuous input stream and there needs to be continuous output stream. This makes it ideal for functional programming, where the input is one stream and the output is another. With functional programming it's known exactly how much processing is required for a given algorithm and helps a lot in knowing what chip is required and what the latency will be. There's also all sorts of crazy optimizations and analysis you can do, which can't easily be done with procedural programming.
Now this isn't to say you can't do a lot of the same stuff in both paradigms, one isn't better or more capable than the other in any absolute way. And for most people procedural thinking is much more intuitive, which is why it's so dominant perhaps. But functional programming has it's niches where it excels.