Category talk:Programming paradigm/Functional

This page is self-contradictory and illogical; the first bullet does not in fact follow from the given definition. And examples are given later of functional programming mechanisms and languages that do allow for state change. I think more attention needs to be given up front to the distinction between the purist FP viewpoint and the more pragmatic viewpoint of languages such as Lisp that *allow* FP programming without requiring it. At minimum, the first bullet should say "desirable" rather than "possible", but I'd prefer a more explicit distinction between the strong and weak FP approaches (or should we call them "strong" and "gradual" to avoid biasing the question? :-). --TimToady 19:34, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

I tend to think purist declarations are false advertising, but the reasons for that bounce near discussion of Hegel and Turing-completeness. This page should probably describe common properties of the paradigm, and use subcategories for common groupings of support/behavior of those properties. That will tie in well with Semantic Mediawiki, which uses categories to define classes and derivations. --Michael Mol 21:41, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Better? --Rdm 15:03, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

While I can now understand the language better, that's not really where my primary concerns were. I think we should stop including languages directly into the category, though, and instead use subcategories (e.g. Category:Programming paradigm/Functional/First-class Functions/degree and explicitness of enforcement or support and Category:Programming paradigm/Functional/Return-encoded state change/degree and explicitness of enforcement or support) to associate langauges with the paradigm. --Michael Mol 16:09, 1 January 2011 (UTC)