In light of the following comment by jim, I think we do disagree:

Please be careful about exposing programmers to ideology; it frequently turns into politics kills their minds. This piece in particular is a well-known mindkiller, and I have personally witnessed great minds acting very stupid because of it. The functional/imperative distinction is not a real one, and even if it were, it's less important to provability than languages' complexity, the quality of their type systems and the amount of stupid lurking in their dark corners.

And while I would normally interpret jim's nearest comment in this thread charitably (i.e., mostly in agreement with me), it's more reasonable to interpret in light of quoted comment.

I think he probably doesn't or didn't understand the functional paradigm. If he did, I think he would know about its usefulness in concurrent or parallel programming, and consequently know that it is not just a mind-killing ideology like US political parties, but a paradigm with real advantages and real disadvantages over other paradigms. I don't think he would have written his first comment if he really knew that. I think he's probably confusing the functional idiomatic approach/style/dialect/whatever with the functional paradigm. I mean he says "The majority of the difference between functional style and imperative style is in how you deal with collections." And remember this thread was created in reference to a comment about a textbook on functional programming (not functional "style" -- maybe he's backpedaling or charitably he means fp).

(also c++ is a non-garbage-collected language. And more importantly I don't mean to shit on jim. I'm more worried about how many people thought it was a comment worth being at the top of the comment section in a thread about course recommendations for FAI researchers. I would have been fine ignoring it otherwise)