James Britt wrote:
> A strict functional style still may reduce bugs and make the code easier 
> to reason about though.

I don't think that's ever been tested, mostly because every time someone 
makes a serious proposal in favor of "strict functional" programming, 
the naysayers jump on it and stomp it to death.

Case in point: Read John Backus' Turing lecture on functional languages, 
and contrast attempting to read his code with reading the Rails code. I 
think you'll find it's easier to reason about the Rails code than it is 
to reason about the examples in the Backus paper, or a long string of 
combinators in the SKK calculus, or maybe even Scheme code.

It all boils down to this: if somebody will pay me to write in a 
functional language, I'll do it. But I'm not holding my breath, nor am I 
seeing great numbers of "Help Wanted" ads looking for Haskell, OCaml or 
Erlang programmers.