> I have to add, I have no idea how a functional language offers an
> advantage
> over an object language except I don't ever remember seeing
> threading way
> back when.

We did Miranda at university which was a functional language. I was
quite surprised some years ago to find that functional languages were
the next big thing, having done one so many years ago (1989). The big
deal is that functions are first class actors in a functional
language. So you can pass a function to another function *. This was a
big deal in my School, being a School of Mathematics and Computer
Science, it think they saw it as a tool for propositional calculus or
somesuch.

* yes like javascipt