Quote of the Day

This little gem from Keith Braithwaite:

"The only reason we'd bother to use map/reduce is because of its non–functional characteristics (as the properties of software that make it actually useful are called) [...]"

Keith is being polemical here (and, in fairness, as we Irish say, I've quoted him out of context). And as far as I can go with this he has a point. However his point stops at the place outlined by Josh Bloch in his excellent book Essential Java in which the lessons of functional programming in the small (the use of 'final'), i.e., thread-safe constant-objects which were not obvious before Java 1.2 (or is it 1.3) became apparent --- at least to me as a non-lisp-programmer. Thread-safety is evidently (tautologially) an emergent property of concurrency in the language.