What does “pure function” mean in the context of JavaScript? In programming in general, purity is also known as “referential transparency”, a fancy way of saying “replacing an expression or function call with its result will never change the behavior of the program” or a way of saying “every time you pass the same inputs, you always get the same outputs”.

That sounds intuitive, and a function like x => x * 10 looks pure because every single time you pass it the number 3 as argument you will get 30 as output. So how can we tell that one function is pure and the other isn’t? Is it enough that we just read the code?

Spoiler: reading the code isn't enough.

http://staltz.com/is-your-javascript-function-actually-pure.html