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copied!<p>Yes...sort of. Ruby lacks a reasonable construct to enforce immutability. (<code>Object#freeze</code> doesn't count) Immutability is really the cornerstone of functional languages. Further, Ruby's core libraries are highly oriented toward imperative design. Its <code>Array</code> and <code>Hash</code> classes are both mutable by nature, even <code>String</code> has methods which make non-immutable (e.g. <code>gsub!</code>). Ironically, Java is more "functional" than Ruby in this respect.</p> <p>With that said, it is possible to do functional-like programming in Ruby. Any time you use a block/proc/lambda, you are using a feature that comes from functional programming. Likewise, collection methods like <code>map</code> and <code>zip</code> are also higher-order constructs which find their roots in languages like Lisp, ML and Haskell.</p> <p>If you really want to do functional programming, you will want to use a language which is more geared toward that genre. Some suggestions:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://clojure.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><strong>Clojure</strong></a> - Since you phrased the question using Ruby, I'm guessing you're of the dynamically typed persuasion. Clojure is like a strictly-functional Lisp that runs on the JVM.</li> <li><a href="http://research.microsoft.com/fsharp/fsharp.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><strong>F#</strong></a> - Basically OCaml on the CLR. Very nice, very clean</li> <li><a href="http://www.scala-lang.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><strong>Scala</strong></a> - Not a <em>strictly</em> functional language, but much better for it than Ruby</li> <li><a href="http://www.haskell.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><strong>Haskell</strong></a> - Everybody's favorite!</li> </ul> <p>You'll notice that three of these four languages are statically typed. In fact, in the case of Scala and Haskell, these are <em>very</em> statically typed languages (much stronger type systems than, say, Java). I'm not sure why this is a trend in functional languages, but there you have it.</p>

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