Whats good about functional programming?
Spreadsheets and SQL are both fairly specialized languages. Functional programming languages take the same ideas and move them into the realm of general-purpose programming. To get an idea of what a functional program is like, and the expressiveness of functional languages, look at the following quicksort programs. They both sort a sequence of numbers into ascending order using a standard method called “quicksort”. The first program is written in Haskell and the second in C. Whereas the C program describes the particular steps the machine must make to perform a sort — with most code dealing with the low-level details of data manipulation — the Haskell program encodes the sorting algorithm at a much higher level, with improved brevity and clarity as a result.
Spreadsheets and SQL are both fairly specialized languages. Functional programming languages take the same ideas and move them into the realm of general-purpose programming. To get an idea of what a functional program is like, and the expressiveness of functional languages, look at the following quicksort programs. They both sort a sequence of numbers into ascending order using a standard method called “quicksort”. The first program is written in Haskell and the second in C.