Lately I hear a lot about Haskell and functional programming but, to be honest, I don't know anything about it. I know about Object oriented and Procedural but I don't really understand what is functional programming all about.
Functional programming is based on function not on objects.
key ideas.
everything can be describes as a function. (mathematical functions)
functional programming should not access global state from within the function body (no references or pointers)
functions are first class citizens so you can pass a function to another function as parameter
There are however pure and impure functional languages en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purely_functional_programmi…
These mutations of state are often referred as side-effects. like accessing the database or streaming a file. in haskell for example that's what the IO-monad is for.
fpcomplete.com/blog/2017/04/pure-functional-progr…
maybe as a starting point.
Matt Strom
Software Engineer, TypeScript ninja
A very academic answer:
Functional programming is a branch of programming that expresses algorithms using lambda calculus.
Whereas object-oriented and imperative programming express algorithms as Turing machines.
The famous Church-Turing Thesis describes the duality that any function computable by a Turing machine is computable by a lambda calculus and vice versa.
Haskell Curry interestingly was one of the discoverers of the y-combinator, a important function in lambda calculus. For this reason he is the namesake of Haskell and currying.