[craigching]

> "map" and "reduce" are imperative; they order something done.

So maybe it's my age showing, but I was taught that imperative was using explicit variables to control the "looping" (e.g. for with an index a la C style programming) whereas using "higher order functions" was not imperative. And I tend to agree with that. So I disagree that map and reduce are imperative because they don't explicitly control how the looping is done.

Can anyone cite where map and reduce are imperative? Must be some new-fangled text book that I'm not aware of ;)

And I get that someone could impose on me to cite references that map and reduce are not imperative. Point taken and I'm thinking that I got this from SICP in the first place so I'm looking it up now. Will report back if I find anything.

EDIT: First quote from SICP:

"In contrast to functional programming, programming that makes extensive use of assignment is known as imperative programming. In addition to raising complications about computational models, programs written in imperative style are susceptible to bugs that cannot occur in functionalprograms."

[icebraining]

If I may try to answer for Animats, I think the point is that you're still using the map in an imperative way. You set a variable to some list, then you apply a map to that list and assign that to another variable. If you then change the first variable, the latter doesn't change - that means the order of execution matters for the application of the map.

That said, that's mostly a specificity of Javascript than a property of the map operation. There's no reason you can't have a map on an FRP that truly declares a relationship between entities.