Re:Why I Prefer Functional Programming
by itsbruce on Saturday September 21, 2019 @04:57PM
(#21037898)
There's more to the admittedly fuzzy-edged concept of functional programming than function application.
I'd agree with you that the feature list is more important than a vaguer title. That's something Robet Harper talks about: http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2017/05/what-if-anything-is-a-p...
But the selection of features has limited value if the selection isn't coherent and the features don't compose. Within both FP and OOP there are languages whose design choices represent coherent choices with synergy... and ones that don't.
Go's feature set doesn't provide that coherence and synergy for functional abstractions. Frankly, it's an awkward obstacle in that direction. Beyond that, its feature set is deliberately designed to place arbitrary limits on abstraction.
I think the attitude "X is inherently a functional language" is being replaced by the idea that there are clusters of language properties with labels like "functional" or "object-oriented" or "array-based" or whatever, and that a language may overlap with bits of various clusters to a greater or lesser degree.