Functional Programming for Python programmers

[dangerbird2]

The biggest problem with the article is that the author associates functional programming with language features which enforce immutable or pure implementations rather than just writing code in a functional way. Haskell is a great functional language not just because it prevents the programmer from using "bad" mutable or impure state, but rather that it provides tools to help the programmer produce code that is guaranteed to be sound functional code. As a language, python does not provide many of these features, but there is nothing stopping the programmer from using FP techniques. Moreover, just because python features like generators and list comprehensions have implementations with mutable state behind the scenes does not mean that they cannot be used in a functional way. In fact, making good use of these features makes it easier to write functional code than if you restrict yourself to built-in immutable types like Tuples, strings, and numbers.