Just started as in, I’m about an hour into a 4 hour intro video. Seeing two basic ways of manipulating things and don’t understand the difference.

If I want to know the length of a string and I just guess at how to do it I would try one of these two things,

  1. Len(string)
  2. string.len()

What is the difference between these types of statements? How do I think about this to know which one I should expect to work?

  • Rooki@programming.dev
    67·
    4 months ago

    The first one is the approach of Functional Programming language (e.g. Python ) and the second one is the approach for Object orientated languages (e.g. Java, C#)

    • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
      91·
      4 months ago

      Python is not a functional language. It’s highly imperative. For example if-else is a statement, not an expression.

      An obvious counter-example is Rust which uses .len() and is a quite functional language (much more than Python).

      Also object oriented languages aren’t the “opposite” of functional languages. Guess what the O stands for in OCaml.