Is Ruby a functional language?

ruby functional-programming
Esteban Araya picture Esteban Araya · Oct 1, 2008 · Viewed 23.7k times · Source

Wikipedia says Ruby is a functional language, but I'm not convinced. Why or why not?

Answer

Tony Morris picture Tony Morris · Feb 25, 2010

Whether a language is or is not a functional language is unimportant. Functional Programming is a thesis, best explained by Philip Wadler (The Essence of Functional Programming) and John Hughes (Why Functional Programming Matters).

A meaningful question is, 'How amenable is Ruby to achieving the thesis of functional programming?' The answer is 'very poorly'.

I gave a talk on this just recently. Here are the slides.

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