Functional programming has been making big waves in the software industry for the last five years, and everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon. Functional programming is a lot older, starting in the 1950s with Lisp being considered the first programming language (or at least, the first one to introduce functional features) which still exists as Common Lisp, and other dialects such as Scheme and Clojure.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• What is functional programming?
• Basic concepts
• Functional collections
• Implementing a functional list