With the right motivation, you might have discovered functional programming techniques yourself

As I mention in my free functional programming videos, if you had the desire to see your code as math, you might have discovered FP techniques yourself.

As an example, 20 years ago I couldn’t get my sysadmin to install a server-side spam filter at my consulting firm because he was always “too busy.”

So I wrote my own spam-filtering algorithm, and then someone with a CS degree looked at it and said, “That’s a Bayesian algorithm.” I had no idea what that was, I just knew that I was sick and tired of seeing spam all the time.

I later presented this solution at the 2004 Borland Conference (demonstrating how JBuilder helped at that time).