Immutability: The property of functional programmers that prevents them from shutting up about pure functional programming. - @raganwald Computation is not jus

Immutability: The property of functional programmers that prevents them from shutting up about pure functional programming. - @raganwald Computation is not just about functions. If computation were about functions then quicksort and bubble-sort were the same because they're computing the same function. As I said a computing device is something that goes through a sequence of states and what an assignment statement is doing is it is telling you here is a new state, and also there's the notion of it's non-determinism, so the new state is not a function of the old state. So functional programming in a sense - functions - don't solve the problem of programming. - Leslie Lamport Perhaps functional programming is best for S-Programs and P-Programs... S-Programs are programs whose function is formally defined by and derivable from a specification. P-Programs [are problems] that can be precisely formulated but whose solution must inevitably reflect an approximation of the real world. E-Programs are inherently even more change prone. They are programs that mechanize a human or societal activity. - Meir M. Lehman, Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 68, No. 9, September 1980. ... from my fortune clone @ http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup