Functional programming is a
programming paradigm that treats
computation as the evaluation of
mathematical functions and avoids
state and
mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions, in contrast with the
imperative programming style that emphasizes changes in state.Functional languages include
APL,
Erlang,
Haskell,
Lisp,
ML,
Oz and
Scheme. Functional
programming languages, especially
purely functional ones, have largely been emphasized in
academia rather than in commercial software development. However, notable functional programming languages used in industry and commercial applications include
Erlang (concurrent applications),
R (statistics),
Mathematica (symbolic math),
Haskell,
ML,
J and
K (financial analysis), and
domain-specific programming languages like
XSLT.
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