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> Mostly though, I love functional programming because it makes mucking around with data structures a lot easier.

Can you talk more about that? My experience has actually been largely the opposite: immutability actually makes working with data structures /harder/ for me. I'd be interested in hearing about any hidden advantages you've discovered there.

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One such example is the Scala List data structure. It's fundamentally a linked list but the built in routines for Lists such as zip, reduceLeft, map make it easier to transform List elements. By easier I mean, you write less code to do the same task as compared to an imperative program such as Java and without side effects.

In that case, though, the immutability is a property of the operations rather than the data. And you can have mutating versions of most of those operations that alter the data they are working on, e.g. a mutating map.

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