下列文字摘自What is “Functional Programming”?：
In this lesson, I defined functional programming like this:
Functional programming is a way of writing software applications using only pure functions and immutable values.
To support that, I also defined pure function like this:
The output of a pure function depends only on (a) its input parameters and (b) its internal algorithm.
A pure function has no side effects, meaning that it does not read anything from the outside world or write anything to the outside world.
As a result of those first two statements, if a pure function is called with an input parameter x an infinite number of times, it will always return the same result y.I noted that higher-order functions (HOFs) are a terrific FP language feature, and also stated that recursion is a by-product of the definition of FP.
I also briefly discussed some of the benefits of immutable values (and FP in general):
The best FP code is like algebra
Pure functions and immutable values are easier to reason about
Without much support (yet), I stated that immutable values make parallel/concurrent programming easier