Functional Python Programming

New from Packt Publishing: Functional Python Programming.

Also here on Amazon.

The fun part is covering generator functions, iterators, and higher-order functions in some real depth. There's a lot of powerful programming techniques available.

What's challenging is reconciling Python's approach to FP with languages that are purely functional like Haskell and OCaml and others. Years ago, I saw some discussion in Stack Overflow that Python simply wasn't a proper functional programming language because it lacked some features. I'm vague on specifics (perhaps there weren't any) but the gaps between Python and FP are narrow.

As far as I can tell, the single biggest features missing are non-strict evaluation coupled with an optimizer that can rearrange expressions to optimize performance. This feature pair also tends to also produce nice tail-call optimization of recursions.

Languages which are totally non-strict (or fully lazy) need to introduce monads so that some ordering can be enforced in the cases where ordering really does matter.

Since Python is strict (with only minor exceptions) monads aren't needed. But we also sacrifice some optimization capability because we can't reorder Python's strict expressions. I'm not sure this is a gap which is so huge that we can indict Python as being non-functional or not suitable for a functional approach. I think the lack of an optimizing compiler is a little more than an interesting factoid.

An interesting problem that compiled functional languages have is resolving data types properly. It's a problem that all statically-typed languages share. In order to write a really generic algorithm, we either have to rely on a huge type hierarchy or sophisticated type pattern-matching rules. Python eschews this problem by making all code generic with respect to type. If we've applied a function to an inappropriate object, we find out through unit testing that we have TypeError exceptions.

I think we can (and should) borrow functional programming design patterns and reimplement them in Python. This is quite easy and doesn't involve too much work or overhead. For example, the yield from statement allows us to do manual tail-call optimization rather than trusting that the compiler will recognize the code pattern.