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Top results related to what is functional programming language
Top Answer
Answered Dec 06, 2010 · 64 votes
It depends on what you mean by minimal.
To start with, the ancestor of functional languages is, first and foremost, mathematical logic. The computational use of certain logics came after the fact. In a sense, many mathematical systems (the cores of which are usually quite minimal) could be called functional languages. But I doubt that's what you're after!
Best known is Alonzo Church's lambda calculus, of which there are variants and descendants:
- The simplest form is what's called the untyped lambda calculus; this contains nothing but lambda abstractions, with no restrictions on their use. The creation of data structures using only anonymous functions is done with what's called Church encoding and represents data by fundamental operations on it; the number 5 becomes "repeat something 5 times", and so on.
- Lisp-family languages are little more than untyped lambda calculus, augmented with atomic values, cons cells, and a handful of other things. I'd suspect Scheme is the most minimalist here, as if memory serves me it was created first as a teaching language.
- The original purpose of the lambda calculus, that of describing logical proofs, failed when the untyped form was shown to be inconsistent, which is a polite term for "lets you prove that false is true". (Historical trivia: the paper proving this, which was a significant thing at the time, did so by writing a logical proof that, in computational terms, went into an infinite loop.) Anyway, the use as a logic was recovered by introducing typed lambda calculus. These tend not to be directly useful as programming languages, however, particularly since being logically sound makes the language not Turing-complete.
- However, similarly to how Lisps derive from untyped lambda calculus, a typed lambda calculus extended with built-in recursion, algebraic data types, and a few other things gets you the extended ML-family of languages. These tend to be pretty minimal at heart, with syntactic constructs having straightforward translations to lambda terms in many cases. Besides the obvious ML dialects, this also includes Haskell and a few other languages. I'm not aware of any especially minimalist typed functional languages, however; such a language would likely suffer from poor usability far worse than a minimalist untyped language.
So as far as lambda calculus variants go, the pure untyped lambda calculus with no extra features is Turing-complete and about as minimal as you can get!
However, arguably more minimal is to eliminate the concept of "variables" entirely--in fact, this was originally done to simplify meta-mathematical proofs about logical systems, if memory serves me--and use only higher-order functions called combinators. Here we have:
- Combinatory logic itself, as originally invented by Moses Schönfinkel and developed extensively by Haskell Curry. Each combinator is defined by a simple substitution rule, for instance Sxyz = xz(yz) . The lowercase letters are used like variables in this definition, but keep in mind that combinatory logic itself doesn't use variables, or assign names to anything at all. Combinatory logic is minimal, to be sure, but not too friendly as a programming language. Best-known is the SK combinator base. S is defined as in the example above; K is Kxy = x . Those two combinators alone suffice to make it Turing-complete! This is almost frighteningly minimal.
- Unlambda is a language based on SK combinators, extending it with a few extra combinators with special properties. Less minimal, but lets you write "Hello World".
- Even two combinators is more than you need, though. Various one-combinator bases exist; perhaps the best known is the iota Combinator, defined as ιx = xSK , which is used in a minimalist language also called Iota
- Also of some note is Lazy K, which is distinguished from Unlambda by not introducing additional combinators, having no side effects, and using lazy evaluation. Basically, it's the Haskell of the combinator-based-esoteric-language world. It supports both the SK base, as well as the iota combinator.
Which of those strikes you as most "minimal" is probably a matter of taste.
1/5
Top Answer
Answered Nov 12, 2008 · 29 votes
Sorry, I don't agree at all. Code is ultimately a blueprint for making things (objects), so it has to be very precise and rule-governed in order to function reliably. Natural language won't take over programming any sooner than sketching ideas on napkins will take over mechanical engineering.
Other Answers
Answered Nov 12, 2008 · 8 votes
I personally have come to the conclusion natural language programming is somewhat crack.
English is not exactly suited to be used fully as a programming language, too many abstract words that have no-correlation in programming, such as emotive terms and other abstract notions that have no place in programming, so to say programming could ever be "natural language" would follow, that "natural language" could be programming, but it isn't.
Now while I get what you're saying here, the problem is the english language has too many scrap terms and repeated names for the same things, so we'd be using something that isn't even specific to the domain of programming, for the task of programming.
I think its more suited that people understand that programming is in fact a highly specialized language, and use their brains and learn to code in a language, which is simple, declarative, and has a consistent definition, unlike English, where definition is highly subjective.
Once you learn the ins and outs of a language, and learn its schematics and behaviors, you can combine them to do new things.
Take Perl, everyone lambasts it for being line noise, but when you know many programming languages, once you get past the initial hurdles of "OMG LINE NOISE", there is a degree of intuitiveness about it where you can make stuff up you never read about and then see it magically works just as you expected.
And IMHO, domain specific languages trump spoken ones for targeted problem solving.
Other Answers
Answered Nov 12, 2008 · 3 votes
"So, does FP take programming closer to natural-language programming or is it rather an obstacle and mainstream OOP will lead us faster to natural-language programming?"
Neither. Both operate on the same principle that you have to be specific about what you want the computer to do. There must be no room for uncertainty, and neither paradigm has anything to do with natural languages. They tackle an entirely different problem: That of managing and structuring complex code and large codebases.
The big obstacle in natural languages is the parsing. It is impossible to unambiguously parse natural language. Even humans can't do it without a lot of context information (facial expressions, tone of voice), and even then, we still get it wrong quite often.
OOP and FP are only about what happens after parsing. Which meaning is assigned to each semantic element, once it's been identified and parsed.
Perhaps we'll one day be able to program in natural language. I doubt it'll happen within the next couple of decades, but it may happen one day. But today's programming paradigms will neither speed up this process or delay it. They simply have nothing to do with it, and won't help solving the parsing problem.
2/5
Top Answer
Answered May 29, 2011 · 39 votes
Scala does not force you to write in a functional style. This is perfectly valid Scala:
var i = 1while (i < 10) { println("I like side effects, this is number "+i) i += 1}case class C(var i: Int, var set: Boolean = false)def setMe(c: C) = { if (!c.set) { c.set = true; c.i += 1 }; c }setMe(C(5))
So in this sense, horrors, Scala is not functional! Side effects galore, mutable state--everything you can do in Java you can do in Scala.
Nonetheless, Scala permits you to code in functional style, and makes your life easier (than in Java) in a number of ways:
- There are first-class functions
- There is an immutable collections library
- Tail recursion is supported (to the extent that the JVM can manage)
- Pattern matching is supported
- (etc.)
This looks somewhat more functional:
for (i <- 1 to 10) println("Sometimes side effects are a necessary evil; this is number"+i)case class C(i: Int, set: Boolean = false)def setIt(c: C, f: Int=>Int) = C(f(c.i), true)setIt(C(5), _+1)-
It's worth noting that the author of that particular article seems to have a very poor understanding of Scala; pretty much every example that looks ugly in his hands is unnecessarily ugly. For example, he writes
def x(a: Int, b: Int) = a + bdef y = Function.curried(x _)(1)-
But it's not that bad, if you pay attention to what you're doing:
def x(a: Int)(b: Int) = a + bval y = x(1) _-
Anyway, the bottom line is that Scala is not a pure functional programming language, and as such, its syntax is not always ideal for functional programming since there are other considerations at play. It does have virtually all of the standard features that one expects from a functional programming language, however.
3/5
Top Answer
Answered May 23, 2017 · 190 votes
Repeating my own answer to a similar question,
There's no accepted definition of functional programming language.
If you define functional language as the language that supports first class functions and lambdas, then yes, JavaScript *is* a functional language.
If you also consider the factors like support for immutability, algebraic data types, pattern matching, partial application etc then no, JavaScript *is not* a functional language.
I'd encourage you to read the following related blog posts (and also the comments below them):
- Scala is not a functional language
- Erlang is not functional
- Reddit discussion on "Erlang is not functional"
Other Answers
Answered Nov 12, 2008 · 8 votes
I personally have come to the conclusion natural language programming is somewhat crack.
English is not exactly suited to be used fully as a programming language, too many abstract words that have no-correlation in programming, such as emotive terms and other abstract notions that have no place in programming, so to say programming could ever be "natural language" would follow, that "natural language" could be programming, but it isn't.
Now while I get what you're saying here, the problem is the english language has too many scrap terms and repeated names for the same things, so we'd be using something that isn't even specific to the domain of programming, for the task of programming.
I think its more suited that people understand that programming is in fact a highly specialized language, and use their brains and learn to code in a language, which is simple, declarative, and has a consistent definition, unlike English, where definition is highly subjective.
Once you learn the ins and outs of a language, and learn its schematics and behaviors, you can combine them to do new things.
Take Perl, everyone lambasts it for being line noise, but when you know many programming languages, once you get past the initial hurdles of "OMG LINE NOISE", there is a degree of intuitiveness about it where you can make stuff up you never read about and then see it magically works just as you expected.
And IMHO, domain specific languages trump spoken ones for targeted problem solving.
Other Answers
Answered Nov 12, 2008 · 3 votes
"So, does FP take programming closer to natural-language programming or is it rather an obstacle and mainstream OOP will lead us faster to natural-language programming?"
Neither. Both operate on the same principle that you have to be specific about what you want the computer to do. There must be no room for uncertainty, and neither paradigm has anything to do with natural languages. They tackle an entirely different problem: That of managing and structuring complex code and large codebases.
The big obstacle in natural languages is the parsing. It is impossible to unambiguously parse natural language. Even humans can't do it without a lot of context information (facial expressions, tone of voice), and even then, we still get it wrong quite often.
OOP and FP are only about what happens after parsing. Which meaning is assigned to each semantic element, once it's been identified and parsed.
Perhaps we'll one day be able to program in natural language. I doubt it'll happen within the next couple of decades, but it may happen one day. But today's programming paradigms will neither speed up this process or delay it. They simply have nothing to do with it, and won't help solving the parsing problem.
4/5
Top Answer
Answered Sep 21, 2008 · 31 votes
XSLT is declarative as opposed to stateful.
Although XSLT is based on functional programming ideas, it is not a full functional programming language, it lacks the ability to treat functions as a first class data type. It has elements like lazy evaluation to reduce unneeded evaluation and also the absence of explicit loops.
Like a functional language though, I would think that it can be nicely parallelized with automatic safe multi threading across several processors.
From Wikipedia on XSLT:
As a language, XSLT is influenced by functional languages, and by text-based pattern matching languages like SNOBOL and awk. Its most direct predecessor was DSSSL, a language that performed the same function for SGML that XSLT performs for XML. XSLT can also be considered as a template processor.
Here is a great site on using XSLT as a functional language with the help of FXSL. FXSL is a library that implements support for higher-order functions.
Because of FXSL I don't think that XSLT has a need to be fully functional itself. Perhaps FXSL will be included as a W3C standard in the future, but I have no evidence of this.
5/5
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Functional_programmingFunctional programming - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Functional_programmingIn computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions.
learntocodewith.me › learn › functional-programmingWhat Is Functional Programming? Benefits, Uses, & Languages
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www.geeksforgeeks.org › functional-programmingFunctional Programming Paradigm - GeeksforGeeks
www.geeksforgeeks.org › functional-programmingJun 28, 2022 · Learn what functional programming is, its features, concepts, advantages, disadvantages and applications. Functional programming is a declarative style of programming that uses pure mathematical functions and avoids side effects and mutable variables.
People also ask
What is functional programming?
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Functional programming - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programmingWhat are functional programming languages?
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learntocodewith.me/learn/functional-programming/github.com › readme › guidesFunctional Programming 101 · GitHub
github.com › readme › guidesWhat is functional programming? There are three “types” of programming that you may or may not know: procedural programming, object-oriented programming, and functional programming. I’ll focus on the latter two. In object-oriented programming (OOP), you create “objects” (hence the name), which are structures that have data and methods.
www.educative.io › blog › what-is-functionalWhat is functional programming? Explained in Python, JS, and Java
www.educative.io › blog › what-is-functionalFunctional programming is a declarative programming paradigm where programs are created by applying sequential functions rather than statements. Each function takes in an input value and returns a consistent output value without altering or being affected by the program state.
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www.freecodecamp.org › news › an-introduction-to-theNov 15, 2018 · Learn what functional programming is and how it differs from object-oriented programming. Explore the concepts of pure functions, immutability, recursion, and higher order functions with code examples in Clojure.
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www.infoworld.com › article › 2263963Apr 1, 2021 · Functional programming means using functions to the best effect for creating clean and maintainable software. This article illustrates the concepts behind the functional...
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