Nobody explicitly said it wasn't functional, but the original question was "why would you do b (the 'V' shit), instead of a?" ('is this a joke?'), and the response was "well if you care about functional programming you would!" ('is functional programming a joke?'), which is heavily implying that the first example is not functional! (or 'less' functional)

That you don't recognise that is strange to me, and if after my explanation you can't understand that, I don't know what to tell you.