On Thu, Apr 08, 2021 at 02:46:01PM -0400, Stewart C. Russell via talk wrote:
The only functional languages I've ever used (if openscad doesn't count) were DSSSL (Scheme with an embedded CSS engine for document processing in SGML) and XSLT (Scheme [except it's in XML syntax] with an embedded CSS engine for document processing in XML). Both were utterly dismal and I only used 'em because I was paid to. Not being able to use loops but having to write functions that called themselves recursively seemed a huge amount of faffing about and possibly constituted cruelty to programmers.
But using a loop means you are telling the system how to do things, rather than telling it what you want done and letting it (usually) do a better job at the how. After all with a loop you are controlling the excution order of the processing. If done right you usually shouldn't need to care. But yes functional languages require a different philosophy. Functional languages are not for people that want to micromanage the computer. -- Len Sorensen