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Functional Programming: Data
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Functional programming means that programs are executed by evaluating [E]xpressions. This contrasts with imperative programming where programs are composed of statements which change global state when executed. Functional programming, on the other hand, avoids using state and mutable data.
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Functional programming can be considered the opposite of object-oriented programming. Objects are little capsules containing some internal state along with a collection of method calls that let you modify this state, and programs consist of making the right set of state changes. Functional programming wants to avoid state changes as much as possible and works with data flowing between functions. In Python you might combine the two approaches by writing functions that take and return instances representing objects in your application (e-mail messages, transactions, etc.).
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Purely functional programms operate only on immutable data. This is possible because on each modification a new version of a data structure is created and the old one is preserved. Therefore, data structures are persistent as it is possible to refer ... to old versions of them. If there are no more references to the old version the unreferred data can be collected by automatic memory management, such as a garbage collector. Often, bigger data structures share their parts between versions and do not consume as much memory as all versions separately.
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Yes, the syntactic sugar of functional programming is somewhat different from the syntactic sugar of non-functional programming. Yes, functional programming does encourage a different set of techniques for solving problems. Yes, those techniques encourage different ways of thinking about problems and data.
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