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Comment by DanWaterworth | Hacker News Reader

Well, some people write very functional javascript. I've thought of a better definition that circumvents the issue of what constitutes emphasis.

Functional languages are languages used predominantly by functional programmers.

Being functional probably has more to do with how a language is used than the set of features it boasts.

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I don't quite agree. Languages push you in different directions. Haskell pushes you toward FP; you can fight the language and "do" (pun intended) imperative programming, but it's going to be painful.

Can you do FP in any language? Maybe not COBOL, but you could do it in C with function pointers. But it's still easier to do it in Haskell than in C, and it's still easier to do imperative programming in C than in Haskell.

So you have a point. But languages have different characteristics, too, and those differences let us classify languages, if not as "FP" and "non-FP", at least as "more FP" and "less FP".

I'm not saying that every language is the same. I'm saying it's very difficult to define styles of programming, but if you have a particular style (in this case functional), you will gravitate towards languages that facilitate that style. At the boundary, where a language doesn't have a particular leaning, the style that you will adhere to is going to be influenced much more by the community around the language than its features.

That is precisely my favorite definition :)

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