This is kind of a strawman, but if you were to use a similar pseudo-API, what would the imperative code look like? Very fair point about efficiency; for all my

This is kind of a strawman, but if you were to use a similar pseudo-API, what would the imperative code look like? Very fair point about efficiency; for all my love of the FP style, I'll never claim it to be faster or leaner w.r.t memory usage. I'd be curious to see if the simple parallelization made possible by the functional approach could close that performance gap, though. ...and I'm almost positive the difference is subjective. =) Reading over your website, it's clear that you are a very talented engineer, especially in areas where C++ shines. Given this plus your experience at Google developing Protobuf, I'd hazard a guess that you have a significant amount of experience writing OO or imperative code, and probably somewhat less writing in the functional style.