The techniques present in the paper and blog post are not really from functional programming but from mathematics. Functional programming just happens to presen

The techniques present in the paper and blog post are not really from functional programming but from mathematics. Functional programming just happens to present them in the most natural way; this is why the paper chose Haskell. We could implement the same in any Turing-complete imperative language, but then the code would swell by orders of magnitude.