Simple made easy

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

Rich Hickey's presentation which received a standing ovation from Dr. Sussman.

>>35
Purely functional languages suck because they force you to express things uncomfortably at times.

Functional programming languages, especially dynamically-typed ones, allow you a much greater freedom of thought and liberty of code than you will find anywhere else.

Which do you find more readable?

r = [];
for (var i = 0; i < a.length; i++)
  r.append( a[i] * 5 );

or

r = map(
  function(x){ return x*5 + 1; },
  a
);

Functional programming often puts emphasis on recursion or function application (a fancy term you'll see sometimes that just means "calling a function") rather than iteration.

Good examples of functional programming languages are (in alphabetical order) Javascript, Lua, Scheme.  Be careful that Javascript and Lua code is often written in an imperative manner (by programmers who come from non-functional languages), while Scheme programmers try to avoid imperativeness.