[jblow]

Obviously, he's a different person and has a different opinion.

My experience has been that people on HN tend to interpret that part of the posting a little more extrapolatingly than I do. I think he is saying something pretty obvious, which is that when you can structure things in terms of pure functions, you don't have to worry about the side-effects that are one of the main issues you need to contend with when factoring things apart.

This is different from being a "fan of functional programming", i.e. believing you should use current functional programming languages to build your projects, or whatever.