[jacquesm]

You can get a lot of mileage out of functional programming as a style without using a functional programming language, and you can do it in (almost) any other language, the big one: avoid side effects to functions as much as possible. That alone can make all the difference between a maintainable, refactorable and testable codebase compared to one that has side effects all over the place. If that's all you get out of it that's profit.

[labrador]

That's always been good programming practice to me, not functional per se. I learned the term 'spaghetti code' early on and took it to mean not just gotos, but lots of flags, especially globals.