The problem, as always in these discussions, is that no-one wants to define the term "functional programming". Many people will be quite willing, though, to jum

The problem, as always in these discussions, is that no-one wants to define the term "functional programming". Many people will be quite willing, though, to jump on each other for saying things that they believe flow from an incorrect definition of the term. Anyway, at the very least there's two camps. On the one side, you have the hardcore Scheme folks whose conception of functional programming is "if I can't figure out how to write it with tail recursion it must not be computable". On the other side you have the Haskell folks whose conception of functional programming is "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?" Somewhere in between are people who actually get things done.