[vog]

> Imperative/OO [...] programming will just about always win over non-OO declarative programming in an analogy like that (i.e. a Simulation of a real world process)

Some time ago I thought that, too, but I'm no longer convinced. Directly mutating values (OO style) feels more natural at first, but then you have trouble with side effects and order of execution matters more than it should, you start keeping snapshots of the whole state just to get a consistent world state during computation, otherwise this whole mess produces a whole class of bugs on its own. These problem drive you more and more into FP direction, and the FP style definitely does have its merits in this regard.

I think the following article articulates this very well:

"A Worst Case for Functional Programming?"

http://prog21.dadgum.com/189.html