Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

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You're making no sense. Functional programming is more than just "about functions".

DOM APIs are the embodiment of 90s-era OOP. There's literally nothing functional about them. All [1] "functions" are methods defined on very specific objects. You can't even get a proper reference to them without binding them to specific object instances

What exactly is functional about this?

  const newDiv = document.createElement("div");
  const newContent = document.createTextNode("Hello, world");
  newDiv.appendChild(newContent);
  const currentDiv = document.getElementById("div1");
  document.body.insertBefore(newDiv, currentDiv);

Okay, here's an easier question. What will happen here, and why?

   const function_reference = document.getElementById;
   function_reference("#id");

[1] Technically speaking, not all all. The more recent `fetch` is probably the only piece of browser APIs that can be called functional for some very limited definition of functional

Most (all?) other "global" functions are defined on the instance of the window object: getComputedStyle, getSelection etc.

> What exactly is functional about this?

A series of function calls that each do something and each returns a value.

> Okay, here's an easier question. What will happen here, and why?

A function call that does something and returns a value, because in this language complex types are passed by reference.

> A series of function calls that each do something and each returns a value.

Doesn't make it functional

> A function call that does something and returns a value,

Ah, so you don't know.

Here's what will actually happen:

      TypeError: Can only call Document.getElementById on instances of Document

Because it's a method on an object. And you have to bind that method to a specific object instance before you can call it.

If it was functional this would never be the case. But since this is 90s-era OOP, you have to do this:

      const function_reference = document.getElementById.bind(document);
      function_reference("#id");

> A series of function calls that each do something and each returns a value.

This is not what functional programming is. Functional programming is a completely different paradigm for writing code, and it _is_ declarative by definition. The Wikipedia definition is pretty decent:

    Functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. It is a declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that map values to other values, rather than a sequence of imperative statements which update the running state of the program.

The "Comparison to imperative programming" section[1] offers a decent example of the paradigm, but DOM manipulation in JavaScript is pretty much as imperative as it gets. Having functions is necessary, but not sufficient, for functional programming.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming#Compari...

Hate to pile on, but this is absolutely not the definition of functional programming.

Functional programming uses stateless, immutable transformations to contorl data flow. The second you instantiate an object with some internal properties that change in memory, you are no longer programming functionally

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