Top 10 Functional Programming Languages to Know in 2022

Functional programming lets a coder the ease of using functions and are good with data science pipelines

Functional programming is a paradigm in programming, wherein we can code everything using just mathematical functions. Unlike OOPS programming, it is only concerned with 'what's rather than 'how's of solving a problem. With functional programming, learning new tools, paradigms, and perspectives is more fun and always results in a cleaner code. A compact way of programming is what a functional programming language offers. Reusability of the code and the resulting efficiency improvements, comparatively better readability, and easy to debug syntax are some features functional programming is known for. And above all, most functional programming languages work well with the data science domain. Check these top 10 functional programming languages to keep the effect of the 'known yet not unknown' trend of software development off your learning curve, at least to some degree.

1. Clojure:

A general-purpose programming language, compatible with JVM and avoids duplication during calls to Java. It is highly approachable and interactive for a multithreaded programming style. Though a compiled language, it offers features that are supported at runtime. Its macros are notorious for their ugly syntax, however, its main body doesn't need lots of syntactic stuffing. 

2. Elixir:

A high concurrency and low latency programming language, it is most commonly used to build scalable and versatile applications, with additional support for low latency and fault tolerance. When your task is to design an app to take loads of requests, Elixir is the answer, for it combines the best features of Erlang, Ruby, and Clojure languages and supports multithreaded applications.

3. Haskell:

It is an advanced functional programming language, whose syntax is declarative and can be typed statically. That means it is a compile type language and gives an error message for incorrect syntax. It is usually used for high-performance applications as it is great at optimization. The lazy evaluation of arguments facilitates comprehensive composition and better control of constructs.

4. Scala:

It combines features of both static and dynamic languages and is used for building data pipelines and big data projects. With a huge ecosystem of libraries, its static types help avoid bugs in complex applications. It is highly compatible with Java and JVM and provides for fully functioning programming with functions classified as first-class objects.

5. Python:

Though, primarily not a functional language, certain functions available in Python such as lamda, map(), filter() render it with the ability to write concise, high-level, and parallelizable code. It is very popular among data science and machine learning teams for data pipeline and machine-learning operations because of its easy-to-read and understandable syntax.

6. Elm:

Best suited for creating web applications and HTML applications as well, refactoring is pretty much easy with Elm, as it has an intelligent compiler. Powered by a well-architected framework, the applications render very fast. The programming language has high interoperability with JavaScript and has easy to read the code and can be applied to different projects without having to retrace the pattern the code had earlier.

7. F#:

It is an open-source and cross-platform programming language mainly used for writing robust code. It is the functional version of the C# language and comes with easy-to-understand syntax. It supports pattern matching and async programming with its diverse set of data types. It can transform data with the help of function because it follows a data-oriented functional programming paradigm.

8. Erlang:

A process-oriented programming language uses lightweight processes. The beauty of the language lies in its ability to create functions that communicate with each other. It is considered the best programming language for message-based applications like chat apps, messaging queues, and blockchain apps. The applications end up being highly responsive because of the language's automated storage management and garbage collection implemented on a per-process basis.

9. PHP:

Known for its quick prototyping and web development abilities, it requires minimal code even for creating web-based content management systems. It is used for developing some of the most known platforms like Facebook and WordPress. An easy-to-use, simple to interpret language, it is pretty much flexible to be embedded with HTML, JavaScript, and XML. Though a functional programming language, the higher versions support object-oriented programming as well.

10. Java Script:

Basically, a scripting language is used both as an object-oriented and functional programming language. Plain Javascript comes in handy when you need real quick prototyping.  It is a popular programming language among front-end and web developers. It is used for non-browser environments as well such as for developing presentations, games, mobile applications, etc.