[lug] OT, Functional Languages

[Rob Nagler]

Steve Sullivan writes:
> The difficulty with functional languages is they have no real
> representation of state.

This is why they are "bug free".  Stateless programming is always more
robust than stateful programming.  That's why I try to program
statelessly in Perl whenever I can.

As we see more people programming in interpreted languages, they'll
program more functionally, or declaratively -- as I like to put it.
This type of multiparadigm programming isn't clean, and therefore
isn't much studied.

Since all languages are Turing Complete, we can guarantee that
discussions about what is functional, declarative, definitional,
structured, etc. programming is going to go on and on and on.  It's a
good distraction for programmers, kind of like watching sitcoms.

Now back to your regularly scheduled coding. :-)

Rob