[epgui]

> Effectively instead of object.method() you have method(object)

This reflects a very deep misunderstanding of the distinctive characteristics of each paradigm. It's so far off that it's "not even wrong".

Functional programming is much more about things like purity and referential transparency, about composing functions and/or combinators, about a particular way of managing or modelling effects, about a way of thinking, about using certain kinds of data structures and algorithms.

It's not a syntactical difference.

[fn-mote]

>> Effectively instead of object.method() you have method(object)

> This reflects a very deep misunderstanding of the distinctive characteristics of each paradigm.

I think the parent made a hasty reading of the GP comment. The GP shows an awareness of multiple OO systems in R.

I believe the GP is attempting to explain to a Java programmer how R could be considered object-oriented even though `plot(item)` does not "look like" what you would see in an object oriented system.

Which is to say: there is an generic function dispatch based on the type of the first argument to the function. This can be _used_ to write in an OO style.

[int_19h]

What GP is saying is that while Java is object-centric, R (and CLOS etc) is method-centric: you don't have classes with multiple methods, you have generic functions with multiple methods (each of which implements that function for particular argument types): http://adv-r.had.co.nz/OO-essentials.html#s3

This is not about functional programming at all; the distinction here is completely orthogonal to that.