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 The title text is humorous in part because it violates two expectations. First, expressions of the form "X combines some trait of Y with some trait of Z" usually talk about combining traits of two different things (i.e., Y is not equal to Z) whereas this text surprises the reader by having "abstract mathematics" occupy the role of both Y and Z. And second, such expressions usually list two positive traits. The first listed trait (the "flexibility and power of abstract mathematics") is pretty clearly positive. However the second trait (the "intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics") is less clearly positive. Many people actually find abstract mathematics to be quite lacking in intuitive clarity, and for much the same reasons many people often find functional programming also to be lacking in intuitive clarity. So the title text invites the reader to puzzle over whether it really is a positive thing for functional programming to be able to claim to match the "intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics", or whether [[Randall]] might instead have just smacked functional programming with a funny {{w|backhanded compliment}}. Another explanation is that the fact that that part of the title text is confusing is a metaphor for the fact that abstract mathematics and functional programming can be confusing, and the first part of the title text is flexible because it can be applied to a wide variety of situations with different things filling in the blanks for X, Y, and Z, and it's apparently powerful because it's used in marketing a lot,{{Citation needed}} so advertisers must feel that it will have a powerful effect.
-==Longer Explanation==
+===Further explanation===
 Functional programming is a famous paradigm (or style) in modern programming that favors functions that can be evaluated like mathematical functions, i.e., functions are "evaluated" (executed) to return a value (their output) which exclusively depends upon the values of their arguments (their inputs). {{w|imperative programming|Imperative programs}}, by contrast, often make use of one or more variables that are external to the function that is currently executing. This means that an "imperative function" may return a different result for the same input due to changes in a non-local variable, whereas a "pure function" will ''always'' return the same result for a given input; however, in practice some functional programming languages also support non-local variables.

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-==Brief Explanation==
+==Explanation==
 [[White Hat]] questions [[Cueball]]'s faith in {{w|functional programming}}. [[Cueball]] responds saying, "Tail recursion is its own reward."

1270: Functional - Revision history

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172.70.210.233: Undo revision 271849 by Explain xkcd server admin (talk)

Explain xkcd server admin at 22:49, 20 May 2022

Theusaf: Reverted edits by 👖🔥 (talk) to last revision by Jacky720

👖🔥 at 17:42, 11 May 2022

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