Foundational Python for Data Science

13

Functional Programming

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

Brian Kernighan

In This Chapter

• Introduction to functional programming

• State and scope

• Functional functions

• List comprehensions

• Generators

As you have seen so far in this book, a Python program, at its most basic, is composed of a series of statements, which can be simple or compound. The way in which you organize these statements has ramifications for performance, readability, and ease of modification. Some approaches that have been widely adopted are procedural programming, functional programming, and object-oriented programming. This chapter introduces some of the concepts of functional programming, including comprehensions and generators, both of which ...