In a previous post, I introduced a framework called Girder (the code is on github), which aims to facilitate Plain Old Functional Programming on distributed systems. By POFP, I mean code that, as much as possible, consists of normal looking calls to normal looking functions, the only requirement for which is referential transparency: there are no side effects, and calls to the same function with the same arguments should always return the same value. Functional programming, in my view, is dramatically less functional when you use a framework that requires you to cast your algorithm in terms of message passing ...