As others have said, there are patterns specific of functional programming. I think the issue of getting rid of design patterns is not so much a matter of switching to functional, but a matter of language features.

Take a look at how Scala does away with the "singleton pattern": you simply declare an object instead of a class. Another feature, pattern matching, helps avoiding the clunkiness of the visitor pattern. See the comparison here: http://andymaleh.blogspot.com/2008/04/scalas-pattern-matching-visitor-pattern.html

And Scala, like F#, is a fusion of OO-functional. I don't know about F# but it probably has this kind of features.

Closures are present in functional language, but need not be restricted to them. They help with the delegator pattern.

One more observation. This piece of code implements a pattern: it's such a classic and it's so elemental that we don't usually think of it as a "pattern", but it sure is:

for(int i = 0; i < myList.size(); i++) { doWhatever(myList.get(i)); }

Imperative languages like Java and C# have adopted what is essentially a functional construct to deal with this: "foreach".

As others have said, there are patterns specific to functional programming. I think the issue of getting rid of design patterns is not so much a matter of switching to functional, but a matter of language features.

Take a look at how Scala does away with the "singleton pattern": you simply declare an object instead of a class. Another feature, pattern matching, helps avoiding the clunkiness of the visitor pattern. See the comparison here: Scala's Pattern Matching = Visitor Pattern on Steroids

And Scala, like F#, is a fusion of OO-functional. I don't know about F#, but it probably has these kind of features.

Closures are present in functional language, but they need not be restricted to them. They help with the delegator pattern.

One more observation. This piece of code implements a pattern: it's such a classic and it's so elemental that we don't usually think of it as a "pattern", but it sure is:

for(int i = 0; i < myList.size(); i++) { doWhatever(myList.get(i)); }

Imperative languages like Java and C# have adopted what is essentially a functional construct to deal with this: "foreach".