[risto1]

> Does anybody else think functional programming is just one end of the either/or fallacy? Maybe a trap for contemplative people?

> The ultimate goal of software is to build something useful. The "functional programming tutorial:real world uses" and "claims of superiority:adoption" ratios are suspiciously high.

Yes and no, what they're really getting at is declarative vs imperative programming and how declarative programming makes managing state and reasoning about code much simpler. In imperative code you often have to step through mentally or through a debugger to really understand what's going on. It also really simplifies concurrent programming (ie map-reduce).

You can have it both ways -- declarative OO programming exists with Ocaml's module system. You can even write declarative OO programming in Java, using 'static' classes (or non-static but only used to configure so it's essentially immutable), 'final' everything, and immutable data structures