Comment by bitwize

> I'm yet to meet an FP fanatic who actually properly understood OOP.

You just haven't met one who has realized that monads in FP map roughly to objects in OOP yet. :) Both are used for the same broad things: encapsulating/hiding/controlling state and allowing state transformations to be sequenced.

I actually have great sympathy for the functional programmer: having decided that managing both kinds of complexity is mentally exhausting, the functional programmer opts to eliminate, as much as possible, the accidental complexity of willy-nilly side effects in order to better address the inherent complexity of the problem domain. A good programmer can write mostly referentially transparent code with controlled side effects in any language, but it takes more care and forethought to do so in, say, Java.

This is why I say Lisp is really for bad programmers. If you're a programming genius, you can apply the same principles used in Lisp all the time to Java or even C++ code... it's just more work. Work you may not even notice because that stuff comes natural to you. But if you're a mid programmer, much of the friction of working in Java or C++ goes away in Lisp and you feel relieved of a burden. Much more feels within your reach. (I happen to love Lisp, and prefer working in it to anything else if I can, so maybe I'm a bad programmer.)