Why the next language you learn should be functional - Yaron Minsky, Jane Street

[Brian Adkins]

This is an old article (Sep 2011), but someone posted a link to it in IRC this morning, and I thought it would be of general interest to the group.

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2038036

Here's the first part:

"Sometimes, the elegant implementation is a function. Not a method. Not

a class. Not a framework. Just a function. - John Carmack

Functional programming is an old idea with a distinguished

history. Lisp, a functional language inspired by Alonzo Church's

lambda calculus, was one of the first programming languages developed

at the dawn of the computing age. Statically typed functional

languages such as OCaml and Haskell are newer, but their roots go

deep—ML, from which they descend, dates back to work by Robin Milner

in the early '70s relating to the pioneering LCF (Logic for Computable

Functions) theorem prover.

...  "

Brian