The preceding examples offer a hands-on understanding of functional programming in a focused context, but functional programming is intended to drive greater benefits to programming in the large.

With the release of Visual Studio 2010, the Visual F# functional language officially shipped; it now constitutes the alternative offered by Microsoft for functional programming on the .NET platform.

While it might be acceptable to mutate a member variable in procedural or object-oriented programming, in functional programming it's frowned upon to change the state of a variable outside the scope ...