It is nearly a century ago that Alonzo Church introduced the lambda calculus, and over half a century ago that John McCarthy introduced Lisp, the world's second oldest programming language and the first functional language based on the lambda calculus. By now, every major programming language including JavaScript, C++, Swift, Python, PHP, Visual Basic, Java, … has support for lambda expressions or anonymous higher-order functions.
As with any idea that becomes mainstream, inevitably the underlying foundations and principles get watered down or forgotten. Lisp allowed mutation, yet today many confuse functions as first-class citizens with immutability. At the same time, other effects such as exceptions, reflection, communication with the outside world, and concurrency go unmentioned. Adding recursion in the form of feedback-loops to pure combinational circuits lets us implement mutable state via flip-flops. Similarly, using one effect such as concurrency or input/output we can simulate other effects such as mutability. John Hughes famously stated in his classic paper Why Functional Programming Matters that we cannot make a language more powerful by eliminating features. To that, we add that often we cannot even make a language less powerful by removing features. In this book, Graham demonstrates convincingly that the true value of functional programming lies in leveraging first-class functions to achieve compositionality and equational reasoning. Or in Graham's own words, “functional programming can be viewed as a style of programming in which the basic method of computation is the application of functions to arguments”. These functions do not necessarily have to be pure or statically typed in order to realise the simplicity, elegance, and conciseness of expression that we get from the functional style.
While you can code like a functional hacker in a plethora of languages, a semantically pure and lazy, and syntactically lean and terse language such as Haskell is still the best way to learn how to think like a fundamentalist. Based upon decades of teaching experience, and backed by an impressive stream of research papers, in this book Graham gently guides us through the whole gambit of key functional programming concepts such as higher-order functions, recursion, list comprehensions, algebraic datatypes and pattern matching. The book does not shy away from more advanced concepts.