Two quite interesting articles about FP in Python are over at IBM developerWorks: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-prog.html http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-prog2.html Two IMHO interesting things to note are the following: * In Part 1, at the start, there is a bullet list of what the author regards as FP "features". I found the following interesting about this list: - There is no mention of the emphasis placed on strong typing in many modern functional languages. - The author makes it sound as if FP can't handle imperative features, whereas I would say that this is a problem of the past and wasn't an issue in many FP languages (Lisp, ML, ...) in the first place. The opinion of the author is not really suprising, but I think, it indicates a problem in how FP presents itself to the rest of the world. * In Part 2, the author writes at the end: I have found it much easier to get a grasp of functional programming in the language Haskell than in Lisp/Scheme (even though the latter is probably more widely used, if only in Emacs). Other Python programmers might similarly have an easier time without quite so many parentheses and prefix (Polish) operators. I think, this is interesting, because both Lisp and Python are dynammically typed. So, I would have expected the strong type system to be more of a hurdle than Lisp's syntax (or lack thereof). Cheers, Manuel