Are FP and OO orthogonal?

Question

I have heard this time and again, and I am trying to understand and validate the idea that FP and OO are orthogonal.

First of all, what does it mean for 2 concepts t

Answer 1

Orthogonal. It sounds good. If you got an education you can band it about a bit and pretend. Its a bit like paradigm.

It all depends in which circles you travel in and what each type of programming technique will give you. I have read a few posts on SS and most who come from a functional programming language usual persist on the fact that you can only go functional and anything else goes against the thinking and the mind set.

Object Oriented programming is mainly about capturing state and keeping this state as localised as possible as not to be affected by anything that is not part of the object that you manage the state with. On the other hand, functional programming looks at the problem of state from a different perspective and tries to separate state from the system and reduce it down to functions. Yes you can use both techniques in your code but they both are looking at the design of software from different angles.

There has been a great deal of interest in the techniques of Functional Programming, mainly because of the management required of state when dealing with multi-core chips and parallel programming. It seems at this point in time that functional programming does have the upper hand in dealing with this however you can achieve the same effect using Objects. You just think of the problem differently. Instead of scratching you head, trying to get rid of state as much as possible, you look at objects in the design and see how you can pair them down to what the core of what they are expected to do, using design patterns, CRC and Object Analysis. Where Objects do come into there own though, and where functional programming is a lot more difficult is in analysing the real world and mapping it to an understandable computerised system. In OO for example, a person object would be an encapsulation of state with methods that act upon the persons state. In Functional programming, a person would be broken down into data parts and functions that act upon the person data, with the added proviso that data should be created once and only once and be immutable.

I must admit though coming from an OO background, that in most OO languages when dealing with Multi-core chips, I have gone the functional route, mainly by core programming design structures (such as threads and delegates) and pass pseudo data objects around. This has led me to question the techniques of OO programming as it does not seem to map well to this threaded design.