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#REDIRECT [[:Category:Programming paradigm/Functional]]
[[Category:Programming Paradigms]]'''Functional programming''' is a programming paradigm that abstracts away the computation state. The program is designed in a stateless, and thus immutable, manner. In this sense functional programming opposes [[imperative programming]], which focuses on state transitions. Functional programming uses procedural decomposition (see [[procedural programming]]) and [[closure]]s. Subprograms there are pure functions, with the only side effect allowed on the function result. [[Iteration]] is typically replaced by [[recursion]], as the former exposes the state either in the form of the loop variable or as the exit condition.
Stateless abstraction ease program semantics definition. In particular it removes the problems with:
* the order of subexpression evaluation,
* aliasing,
* the evaluation time (see [[lazy evaluation]]).
At the same time it makes programming considerably more difficult, especially when the notion of state is natural to the domain space. Functional languages like [[Haskell]] provide some support for stateful programming, see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monads_in_functional_programming monads].
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