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Some quotes of Knuth on functional programming:

"Out of the ~250 programs I wrote last year, 2-3 would have benefited from being written in a functional style."

"With 1 or even 2 hands tied behind your back it’s hard to do anything dangerous."

I remember looking this up once and couldn't find much. I guess he figures everything that can be written in functional style can be written in imperative style so why bother.

Most algorithms guys don't seem to be that enthusiastic about functional programming. My personal theory is that functional programming is more rooted in abstract logic, which isn't what algorithms is really about.

He famously defended the GOTO statement and mostly writes programs in MIX assembly or Pascal. He seems pretty old school when it comes to programming.