1 Introduction to functional programming

This chapter covers

  • Understanding functional programming
  • Thinking about intent instead of algorithm steps
  • Understanding pure functions
  • Benefits of functional programming
  • C++’s evolution into a functional programming language

As programmers, we’re required to learn more than a few programming languages during our lifetime, and we usually end up focusing on two or three that we’re most comfortable with. It’s common to hear somebody say that learning a new programming language is easy—that the differences between languages are mainly in the syntax, and that most languages provide roughly the same features. If we know C++, it should be easy to learn Java or C#, and vice versa.

This claim does have some ...

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