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[MUSIC]

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Hi, I'm Kenneth, the Treehouse Python
teacher, and I have a secret to confess.

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Some developers program because
it makes our other jobs easier.

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Or, maybe we do it because
it's a good way to make money.

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Or, it scratches a problem solving itch.

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But, for a lot of us,

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myself definitely included, we do it
because it makes us feel really cool.

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I mean, we type a few words, and we get
a neat website or application that does so

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much for us.

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Honestly, this magic is a big part of
what I like about functional programming.

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Functional programming,

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sometimes abbreviated as FP, is one of
a few major approaches to programming.

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You've probably used two
of the others already.

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Procedural programming is
where most of start out.

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Your program just works its way from
top to bottom evaluating each line.

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Maybe there are some functions, but
they're used for repetitious work.

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And you've probably come across
object-oriented programming

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where concepts are broken up into objects,
and then those objects have attributes and

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methods that do the work.

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Both of these approaches are useful
in their own ways, and we've done,

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and will continue to do,
both of them here on Treehouse.

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Functional programming though,

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is a slightly different
approach to programming.

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We're gonna talk more about the rules of
functional programming in the next video.

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But I want you to understand, despite what
you might see in more fanatical blogs or

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guides on the Internet,
or in other languages.

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In Python, functional programming
is just another set of

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tools to keep in your pocket for
problem solving.

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Just to set some expectations,

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this course is going to be a bit more
theory heavy than other courses.

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We'll still be writing plenty of code, but
we have to establish some ground rules and

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approaches up front so that we can
get the best benefit from our code.

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Also, many of our examples will be
more about here's a useful approach

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then us working together one step
at a time to solve a final problem.

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I found over the years that functional
programming usually isn't an end

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in and of itself.

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It's just another superpower to use when
you need to do a lot of amazing work with

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just a bit of code.