Would have been a stronger case if Julia, Erlang/Elixir, or Clojure/Racket was used.
Python is one of the worst dynamic/FP languages I've ever had the displeasure to utilize.
I think the OP needs to step out of their comfort zone of Python.
Python is one of the worst dynamic/FP languages I've ever had the displeasure to utilize.
I think the OP needs to step out of their comfort zone of Python.
With a dynamic, functional language you could enjoy all of this simplicity. But you don't even need that to benefit from this perspective today! You can adopt the techniques of functional programming right now in your favorite language (such as Python, used above). What's important is your mindset and how you approach problems, minimizing state and maximizing clarity in the code you write.
I did elsewhere in a top level comment go into detail about why I thought TFA wasn't good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33722399
Also, in my experience, Pythonistas tend to be more resistent to paradigm changes. So often I have heard, "Why would you want to do that?", or "This works fine as it is.". Not that I'm a fan of list comprehensions in Python (I think they're awkward and ugly compared to Ruby collection operations), but Python codebases I have had the displeasure of working in had lots of nested loops, mutations everywhere, copy-pasted code, and 30+ line methods. Trying to encourage single-responsibility, composability, less OOP, and more pure functions is like shoveling water uphill.
With both Ruby and Python you do need to be a bit thoughtful about unnecessary collection copies (which you would tend to favor when writing pure functions); but often you have a good sense of how large a volume of data you are handling and where copies will be particularly slow or heavy to do. When necessary, you can have an impure function that mutates input data, and at least in Ruby you can warn callers of the impending mutation by adding the ! to the function name. update_order!(order).