6.8. Functional Programming

Ruby is not a functional programming language in the way that languages like Lisp and Haskell are, but Ruby’s blocks, procs, and lambdas lend themselves nicely to a functional programming style. Any time you use a block with an Enumerable iterator like map or inject, you’re programming in a functional style. Here are examples using the map and inject iterators:

# Compute the average and standard deviation of an array of numbers
mean = a.inject {|x,y| x+y } / a.size
sumOfSquares = a.map{|x| (x-mean)**2 }.inject{|x,y| x+y }
standardDeviation = Math.sqrt(sumOfSquares/(a.size-1))