Benefits

• The “environment” you’re programming against are the function arguments
• Reuse is imminent. Composition is what everyone calls it.
• Functions’ results can be cached (memoization)

There must be many more benefits.. These three are the ones I can think of and the ones that get the most marks from my side.

Main Concepts

Functional programming is a technique that depends on the programmer adhering to some principles (it helps if the programming language forces him as well):

Purity

A pure function has no side effects i.e. it depends only on its arguments.

(defn pure-function [input]
  (if input output-1 output-2))

In this example, if the pure-function is really pure, then depending on the input, the return value always remains the same. This also means that the output-1 and output-2 data are immutable i.e. they’re unchangable!

Referential Transparency

In the example above, we might just have replaced the output of pure-funtion with either output-1 or output-2 thus avoiding the call to a function. Many languages can optimize this behavior by caching the result. It’s called memoization. This also means that you could parallelize stuff i.e. functions can be independently evaluated on different machines/cores/nodes whatevers.

Persistence

Immutability is key. You never mutate. An operation on data doesn’t change the data, it just returns new data. This naive approach is memory hungry I suppose but platforms and languages find ways to optimize stuff.

Laziness

Since I’m learning Clojure, there might be a bias because seq are everywhere and they’re laaaaaaaaaaazy! That is, you only evaluate stuff when it’s required and never before. This enables infinite length sequences. Also, we pay for operations only when required.

Conclusion

I’m still a Functional Programming newbie but Clojure is opening my eyes! I am intrigued.

Fin!