Introduction

R, at its heart, is a functional language. This means that it has certain technical properties, but more importantly that it lends itself to a style of problem solving centred on functions. Below I’ll give a brief overview of the technical definition of a functional language, but in this book I will primarily focus on the functional style of programming, because I think it is an extremely good fit to the types of problem you commonly encounter when doing data analysis.

Recently, functional techniques have experienced a surge in interest because they can produce efficient and elegant solutions to many modern problems. A functional style tends to create functions that can easily be analysed in isolation (i.e. using only local information), and hence is often much easier to automatically optimise or parallelise. The traditional weaknesses of functional languages, poorer performance and sometimes unpredictable memory usage, have been much reduced in recent years. Functional programming is complementary to object-oriented programming, which has been the dominant programming paradigm for the last several decades.