1.5 Summary
In this chapter, we’ve looked at programming paradigms with an eye toward distinguishing the functional paradigm from the imperative paradigm. For our purposes, object-oriented programming is a kind of imperative programming; it relies on explicit state changes. Our objective in this book is to explore the functional programming features of Python. We’ve noted that some parts of Python don’t allow purely functional programming; we’ll be using some hybrid techniques that meld the good features of succinct, expressive functional programming with some high-performance optimizations in Python.
In the next chapter, we’ll look at five specific functional programming techniques in detail. These techniques will form the essential foundation for our hybridized functional programming in Python.
