In reaction to some of the comments popping up re. OOP and functional programming: I've come across quite a bit anti-OO sentiment in my career now, and not nearly as much anti-functional sentiment. I suspect that the prevalence of OOP has something to do with it - you're more likely to have been exposed to bad OO code than any other type simply because there's more of it. People often seem to draw an artificial distinction between OO and functional styles - but they're both just techniques that can be applied to solving problems and work well in combination. E.g. purely functional immutable objects seem to yield very readable and maintainable code. You can write bad code in any paradigm; but the more open you are to combining a variety of techniques, the more options you have for creating a good solution to the problem at hand.