Maybe I come from a different direction, lots of data. If you do any functional programming on these you are creating new lists/vectors (the type) left and right. To me this is the gist of functional programming. So when I started the article, I was wondering how would you do that in c++, well his answer is you shouldn't. So when you are saying it is just one thing for me it is like a car without an engine (also only missing one thing). (the other thing about functional programming is the widespread use of recursion, but this is not even mentioned in the article)