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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

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In your provided reference, the first sentence Rob writes:

"Ever since Swift came out, I keep seeing weird comments that Swift is a functional programming language"

Swift is often promoted as being "functional":

http://www.raywenderlich.com/114456/introduction-functional-...

In fact, I've tagged many articles as functional in my Swift resources:

http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?q=functional&age=10...

Want to buy a book on functional programming in Swift?

https://www.objc.io/books/functional-swift/

Note that the objc.io book is more about building functional idioms from scratch so you can use swift in a functional way, rather than actually leveraging a strong functional core of the language. The fact remains that Swift is just not a functional language and attempts to categorize it as such are unrealistic.

Swift is a multi-paradigm language. In that Ray Wenderlich article you linked, he writes "This tutorial focuses on just one of these methodologies, FP (Functional Programming)"

On a WWDC video named something along the lines of "Value types in Swift" they explained that Apple is trying to get try middle ground between protocol oriented and functional. Same thing with mutability and immutability. They aren't pure anything because both ways have their purposes.

People say a lot of things. Doesn't make them right.

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