Anyway I agree with the overall sentiment, and will check out the talk you linked. There's another good one along similar lines: "The Clean Architecture in Python" by Brandon Rhodes: http://pyvideo.org/pyohio-2014/the-clean-architecture-in-pyt...

Yes, but, say, in Haskell, that's not an option.

It's useful to note that Haskell is usually touted as efficient, and lack of efficiency is a #1 concern around functional programming. That concern I personally find revolting: Haskell is slower than C, yes, but orders of magnitude faster than many widely used languages.

    forM_ [1, 2, 3, 4] $ \n ->
        print n

Haskell does have the ST monad, which lets you encapsulate a non-pure algorithm (as in, one that relies on mutable state) within a pure function.

In fact, any monad will let you write imperative looking code (whose behavior is determined by the semantics of the particular monad), the standard library even provides for and while loops as functions.

You can also look at OCaml, which is very clearly a functional language, but has 1st class support for side effects and loops.

I'd say you have at least three fairly straightforward options.

1. Mechanically translate the loop to a recursive call. Not always idiomatic, but easy and pretty much guaranteed to compile to the same/similar assembly for a tight loop.

2. Use StateT and lenses. Your code can even look almost exactly like C if you want, with for and while loops with the same semantics as in C. I often use this when implementing heavily imperative papers in Haskell. It's still pure and everything, but looks just like an imperative language and performs well (if maybe not always full C speed).

3. If for some reason neither of those approaches work (e.g. If you're writing an algorithm that really benefits from mutation), you can use IO or ST for mutable variables. ST is really cool; it provides local mutability, but uses the type system to ensure that mutability never "escapes" into pure Haskell.

I am no Haskell expert and that sounds quite interesting. Do you have any links to examples?

Here's a fairly in-depth analysis of the approach: http://www.haskellforall.com/2013/05/program-imperatively-us...

The gist of it is that StateT gives you nice syntactic sugar around state-update functions of type `state -> (state, result)`.

Let's say your state type is like

    data Boss = Boss {
        health :: Int,
        ...
    }
    
    data Player = ...
    
    data State = State {
        boss :: Boss,
        player :: Player,
        ...
    }

    boss.health -= 1
    player.stats.score += 5

Unless you make the mistake of using a String, in which case it will be orders of magnitude slower than any widely used language.

> Yes, but, say, in Haskell, that's not an option.

Sure it is! It might not be a "for" loop or a "while" loop with a "for" or "while" keyword, but a tail recursive function is a loop, and pretty much every loop in an imperative language can easily be translated into a recursive function in a functional language.

> any loop can be turned into a recursive function so long as your stack is big enough, even if they're usually hideous

What amuses me to no end is how TCO turns around and converts that recursive function call right back into a loop before executing it.

And this summarizes my thoughts about the main disadvantage of functional programming - you're working against the way the computer fundamentally works, and relying on the compiler to get it right.