Functions vs OOP

[Ian Kelly]

On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 10:15 AM, William Gill <noreply at domain.invalid> wrote:
> During some recent research, and re-familiarization with Python, I came
> across documentation that suggests that programming using functions, and
> programming using objects were somehow opposing techniques.
>
> It seems to me that they are complimentary.  It makes sense to create
> objects and have some functions that take those objects as arguments. Are
> they suggesting that any function that takes an object as an argument should
> always be a method of that object?  Conversely I can see creating functions
> that take raw input (e.g. strings) and return it in a format compatible with
> an object's constructor, rather than have objects accept any conceivable
> format for its constructor.
>
> Am I missing something, or am I taking things too literally?

I think you may be confusing "functional programming" and "programming
using functions".  These are not the same thing.

Functional programming is about using functions in the *mathematical*
sense.  A mathematical function maps one value (or tuple of values) to
another value.  The mapped value never varies; if it did, it would be
a different function.  So functional programming eschews the use of
functions where the results depend on any internal or external state
beyond the values of the passed-in arguments, such as the variable
state of the object the method is being called on.

Functional programming and OOP are not entirely opposed -- for
example, string methods in Python such as str.upper are perfectly
functional, since strings are immutable.  Many functional languages
such as Common LISP also have powerful OOP facilities.  Still,
functional programming does not fit well with the traditional OOP
model of objects passing messages to other objects, which generally
implies statefulness.

Cheers,
Ian