Introduction to Functional Programming in Python

Most of us have been introduced to Python as an object-oriented language; a language exclusively using classes to build our programs. While classes, and objects, are easy to start working with, there are other ways to write your Python code. Languages like Java can make it hard to move away from object-oriented thinking, but Python makes it easy. Given that Python facilitates different approaches to writing code, a logical follow-up question is: what is a different way to write code? While there are several answers to this question, the most common alternative style of writing code is called functional programming.