> Basically, that function is too big, and it uses too many mutable variables. An interesting statement that; particularly the part about mutable variables. Mu

> Basically, that function is too big, and it uses too many mutable variables. An interesting statement that; particularly the part about mutable variables. Mutability implies state, and state seems to be something we, as programmers, often struggle with. Keeping the those state transitions within our mental model seems to be the hard part. I've been studying Clojure a lot over the past 12 months; it's approach is quite different from the 9-to-5 Java I write. Rich Hickey's notion of disentangling state into value and identity has been so very helpful to me in dealing with the 'problem' of mutability and state transitions in how I write my own code. Lisp, whatever the dialect, doesn't strike me as the sort of thing that most Java shops (particularly the large corporate variety) are going to swallow, but the ideas of Clojure... Perhaps I need to get out more, but it's the only language I've seen that proudly embraces a deeply functional paradigm without punting on State (or destroying my brain with monads). I have no deep love for Java, but once Java 8 arrives with lambdas, all I'll really want is a good implementation of persistent data structures. PS nothing against monads (or Haskell) - I just haven't gotten there in my Perlis journey.