Functional programming - Re: NetBSD's i386 support, was Re: [cctalk] Old UNIX Systems

It's not completely a joke. I live in that world these days. We've definitely found that folks whose foundation is in procedural languages (or assembly, and I count myself solidly in that crowd) have much more difficulty wrapping our brains around FP paradigms. Not all of them...some folks are just naturals and pick it right up, but it involves letting go of a lot of habits. The insult when I was coming up was "nice, you can write Fortran in C (or Pascal)". Now it's "nice, you can write C in Scheme/Python/Ruby" (and, no, I'm not interested in going down the rabbithole of whether you think Python and Ruby are FP "enough"). However, for folks coming to it fresh(er), and in particular from other disciplines (mathematics, biology, social sciences, etc.) they don't seem to have nearly as hard a time dealing with the abstractions FP brings to problem solving. For these folks, the higher level abstractions map more closely to how they're looking to solve problems, and they're getting remarkable, world impacting results (See: bioinformatics and python). Things I perhaps could, but would not want, to try and solve in C. But I wouldn't want them to write an OS. So....not just right tool for right job, but right mind/approach/adaption for right job.