The Evolution of Functional Programming

Erin asks in the early days of mathematica perhaps even today well most people used to thinking of programs procedurally can you talk about people's reaction to learning to do functional programming. I don't think anybody who hasn't been exposed to kind of coding of the kind that fits in to sort of the structure of computers as computers were originally built is not sure that people find procedural programming natural in any way. The very idea of a pure function took a long time to develop that idea in the history of of human intellectual development and it's not an idea that to most people that i don't think i've ever seen anybody to whom that idea was self evidently obvious when exposed to a computer so