Functional Programming: A Brief Introduction

Functional Programming Languages provide 2 main features:

1. First class functions 
• which means functions are first-class citizens.
• functions can be assigned to variables
• functions can be stored in data structures
• functions can be passed to other functions as arguments
• functions can be returned from other functions
2. Pure functions without any side-effect
• Functions take values as parameters and return values.
• No global or mutable state.

What do these two features lead to

• Localized thinking space 
• Localized testing 
• Control abstraction with higher order functions
• More readable & shorter code
• Higher order Functions leads to less branches and assignments, which in turn leads to readable, shorter code. 
• Data abstraction with closures
• Concurrency - immutable data structures
• Simplifies programming. No need for complicated Object Oriented Design Patterns, which are required to solve problems that Object Orientation introduces.