Advantages of Functional Programming

With functional programming seemingly getting more interest recently I was reminded of, "Can Your Programming Language Do This?" and "Functional programming in the Java language".

Joel said, "Lemme repeat that. By abstracting away the very concept of looping, you can implement looping any way you want, including implementing it in a way that scales nicely with extra hardware."

"Without understanding functional programming, you can't invent MapReduce, the algorithm that makes Google so massively scalable. The terms Map and Reduce come from Lisp and functional programming. MapReduce is, in retrospect, obvious to anyone who remembers from their 6.001-equivalent programming class that purely functional programs have no side effects and are thus trivially parallelizable."

MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters, "MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. Many real world tasks are expressible in this model, as shown in the paper."

An interesting paper, especially if you were interested in creating massively scalable triple stores for example.