Re:Swift and the Legacy of Functional Programming
by kibwen on Monday November 21, 2016 @02:28PM
(#13008340)
That doesn't make the term meaningless, it just means that "functional programming" is a victim of its own success.
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Re:Swift and the Legacy of Functional Programming
by eridius on Monday November 21, 2016 @04:13PM
(#13009268)
If you can apply the term to every programming language in widespread use today[1], then yes, it is pretty useless. There is real value in having the term "functional programming" be meaningful and denote a certain class of languages; defining that as "any language with first-class function values" is too broad as to render the term meaningless.
[1] Even C has this with Apple's Blocks extension (http://clang.llvm.org/docs/Block-ABI-Apple.html).