It's unfortunate you're being downvoted for your opinion instead of having other ideas presented to you so I'll do my best though I'm no expert. > Whereas in t

It's unfortunate you're being downvoted for your opinion instead of having other ideas presented to you so I'll do my best though I'm no expert. > Whereas in the functional world, you’ll have to 4 different ‘.read’ function calls with an if statement. You could do this but that's not idiomatic. What you would preferably do is have a function that takes a read function as a parameter. This is essentially the same thing as what OO languages implicitly do. For an example of generic functions you can take a look at map or fold/reduce. You'll see they don't need to use if statements in the way you described.