In the article "Why Functional Programming Matters"[1] John Hughes explains the benefits of the "no destructive assignments" handicap. Basically, having no assi

In the article "Why Functional Programming Matters"[1] John Hughes explains the benefits of the "no destructive assignments" handicap. Basically, having no assignments yields new ways to glue code together. It is somewhat similar to the benefits of structured programming as opposed to goto's. Also, functional languages such as Haskell don't forbid mutability/effects, they just make them explicit. This is only a handicap in the sense that it makes some types of changes more difficult (e.g: Adding an effect to code that previously did not have one). But this has enormous advantages, because there are so many interesting things we can do when we have the guarantee that things have no effects when they actually don't. [1] http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/whyfp90.pdf http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/whyfp90.pd...