> And it is not perfect. You will still occasionally have the original imperative problems. But you will have radically, radically fewer of them, so few that the cost/benefit analysis of using the super-strong stuff becomes very difficult to justify, especially over the advantages of being able to use that library you really need.
This has unfortunately not been my experience. Working alone, sure, I can write acceptably pure code in a conventional language. But generally the issue isn't what I can do, it's what my coworkers will do. Even if almost everyone manages to maintain strict discipline without the support of the language, it really only takes one "productive" cowboy to create a disaster. The biggest advantage of pure functional programming is that taking the path of least resistance produces code that's still sort of ok.
This has unfortunately not been my experience. Working alone, sure, I can write acceptably pure code in a conventional language. But generally the issue isn't what I can do, it's what my coworkers will do. Even if almost everyone manages to maintain strict discipline without the support of the language, it really only takes one "productive" cowboy to create a disaster. The biggest advantage of pure functional programming is that taking the path of least resistance produces code that's still sort of ok.