Chapter 1. Introducing Functional Programming

Functional programming defines a computation using expressions and evaluation—often encapsulated in function definitions. It de-emphasizes or avoids the complexity of state change and mutable objects. This tends to create programs that are more succinct and expressive. In this chapter, we'll introduce some of the techniques that characterize functional programming. We'll identify some of the ways to map these features to Python. Finally, we'll also address some ways in which the benefits of functional programming accrue when we use these design patterns to build Python applications.

Python has numerous functional programming features. It is not a purely functional programming language. It offers enough ...

Get Functional Python Programming now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.