Comment by frankmcsherry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frankmcsherry | Hacker News Reader

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> In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm—a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs—that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing-state and mutable data.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming

I totally agree that neither iterators nor 2/3s of closures are "functional programming". That's fine, though, because I really enjoy the sane way that it all was done.

If you check out

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/iter/trait.Iterator.html

and search for `FnMut`, you see that most of the iterator methods are side-effectful. That is cool and fun and very useful, but it isn't functional programming.

Edit. The term you are probably looking for (guessing) is "higher-order programming":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_programming

Yeah that is one way of doing it, but I'm not sure how practically useful it actually is; many functional languages do allow for mutation and/or side effects too. Often in a controlled way, of course, but then again, so does Rust. That said, I wouldn't argue that Rust is a functional language exactly, mostly that I find essentialist FP definitions to be lacking, like most essentialist definitions.

That said, you're right that "higher order" is a better description of these features, but my counter would be that most people perceive higher order programming as an aspect of functional programming, bringing it full circle again :)

Most people perceive structs and fields as an aspect of object-oriented programming, but you probably wouldn't write about them under the heading of "Object-oriented programming".

Maybe change the title to "Functional Language Idioms"?

The "oh no OOP" chapter is later :)

That's a good suggestion, I'll think about it, thanks :)

`FnMut` just means that the iterator methods don't artificially restrict the user-supplied closures. `map` itself doesn't become impure just because you can map `|x| { counter += x; x+1 }` over your list if you really want to.

I think it's fair to say that iterator methods are typically used as combinators to build computations out of pure functions to avoid having to manage mutable state.

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