This isn't a good idea. And his functions, well... they're gross. You're going to replace

  orderCost = orderCost - shipping;

with

  ApplyFreeShipping();

Now you've violated referential transparency, introduced some unnecessary global and mutable state, and not really made anything clearer.

Let's take his other example:

  var outstanding = GetOutstandingOrders();

Into

  var allOutstandingOrders = GetOutstandingOrders();

Please for the love of god, no. Variable names should be short, and in my controversial opinion, as short as possible. Long variable names actually make code more difficult to understand, not easier. Rob Pike talks about it in the Practice of Programming, and it's a common tenant among APL/J/K programmers as well.

Here's how I wish programs were structured:

1) Make your code as terse and dense as possible so you can see as much of it at one time as possible (see code written by Arthur Whitney). 2) Make your variable names abbrevations or acronyms, like instead of 'convertInt', call it 'ci'. 3) Comment every function and keep each function to only a couple lines. 4) Because your functions are so small and dense, you'll never need to modify them, only throw them away. 5) Bam, your comments and never out of date because the functions you're writing never need to be modified, only deleted.

Unfortunately, most programming languages don't give you sufficient power to do anything in a couple lines. Which brings up the question, why don't we switch to those that do? Honestly, J or K would be totally usable for the vast majority of programming problems.