“Functional programming” has a clear meaning, but does “functional language”?

Question

I understand very clearly the difference between functional and imperative programming techniques. But there\'s a widespread tendency to talk of \"functional languages\

Answer 1

I wrote a (pretty long) analysis once on why the term 'functional programming language' is meaningless which also tries to explain why for instance 'functions' in Haskell are completely different from 'functions' in Lisp or Python: http://blog.nihilarchitect.net/archives/289/on-functional-programming/

Things like 'map' or 'filter' are for a large part also implementable in C for instance.