On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Mike Gold <mike.gold.4433 / gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I use functional-ness in ruby on a small scale, such as inside the
> implementation of a method, but no wider.  For reasons I gave earlier,
> functional style is most applicable to flat arrays and hashes, and
> probably less so with more complex structures
> (http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_thread/thread/472e714cffa0f50c).

There are two, not-really-identical things that people mean when they
speak of "functional programming" - programming via pure,
side-effectless functions, and programming via higher order functions.
The former doesn't really make sense for ruby, as several people have
pointed out, but the latter is a useful technique, and pretty well
supported.

martin