Is Python a functional programming language?

[Alia Khouri]

Paul Rubin:

> I like learnyouahaskell.com if you want to get some exposure to Haskell,
> probably the archetypal functional language these days.  I've been
> fooling with it on and off for the past couple years.  I'm still not
> convinced that it's that good a vehicle for practical general purpose
> software development, but there are some specific areas where it works
> out just beautifully.  And in terms of the challenges it presents and
> the amount I've learned from it, it's one of the most interesting things
> I've done as a programmer in as long as I can remember.  It really is
> mind altering.

Completely agree with you. Learnyouahaskell.com is as good as it gets
to learn haskell: haven't had so much fun learning a language since I
picked up python :-)

For similarly mind-altering pleasure, have a look at pure-lang [http://
code.google.com/p/pure-lang/] which describes itself as:

"Pure is a modern-style functional programming language based on term
rewriting. It offers equational definitions with pattern matching,
full symbolic rewriting capabilities, dynamic typing, eager and lazy
evaluation, lexical closures, built-in list and matrix support and an
easy-to-use C interface. The interpreter uses LLVM as a backend to JIT-
compile Pure programs to fast native code."

Enjoy!

AK