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There are about a thousand FP programmers to every imperative programmer, if not ten thousands. They use a tool you may have heard of, called "Excel", which is quite limited in scope.

It is an FP subset which is at the same time trivial to understand (much more so than imperative programming for most users!), and coupled with a usable I/O capabilities, is surprisingly sufficient for many uses.

(IDE, documentation, maintainability all suck, though; I wouldn't recommend it as your main FP tool if you can avoid it)



And many Java programmers doing FP programming unknowingly when writing an Ant script.


No - ant is logic programming, not functional programming. Same with make.


Yes! Excel formulas === FP! And as you say, there are orders of magnitude more Excel users than imperative programmers, so FP can't be as hard as is usually claimed, and certainly not as "unnatural".

(Before Excel 5 and VBA that Joel Spolsky claims he invented, macro language in Excel was also FP; it was a crazy but fascinating language in which I developed a whole billing application (in 1992...) I miss this language.)


I'm a bit surprised whenever someone says that Excel is functional programming. It's more accurately described as dataflow programming.

To illustrate, Common Lisp directly supports functional programming but not dataflow programming (though it's possible to implement as a library).




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