Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I really do appreciate it.
It isn't the programming that is the hard thing. Writing some code to do something meaningful is not what is giving me a problem. Actually, it is trying to develop a deep understanding of functional programming that I am finding difficult. Maybe the problem is that I am confusing functional programming with purely functional programming?
My apologies to tumult if it came off that I was lecturing in my original post. I find it challenging to get tone perfectly right on the Internet. Face to face conversation or conversation over a phone is far better.
I think maybe this entire thread comes down to a question of semantics. When I program in non-functional languages I tend to lean towards using map/reduce type constructs a lot, but I never really thought of that as "functional programming". I guess I always thought that in order to really do functional programming, you really needed to have some kind of deep understanding of it.
Maybe if I had a formal computer science background, my perspective would be a little bit different because I would have more easily seen the point that you are making. As it stands, my background is in the social sciences and my knowledge of the science part of computer science is sometimes lacking.
Perhaps you are right, I should have been better informed before attempting to inform others. But if I had not typed my original post, then I would have never received your helpful reply and I would still be in the dark!