Originally Posted by Gamasutra - News - In-depth: Functional programming in C++

Probably everyone reading this has heard "functional programming" put forth as something that is supposed to bring benefits to software development, or even heard it touted as a silver bullet. However, a trip to Wikipedia for some more information can be initially off-putting, with early references to lambda calculus and formal systems. It isn't immediately clear what that has to do with writing better software.

My pragmatic summary: A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in. In a multithreaded environment, the lack of understanding and the resulting problems are greatly amplified, almost to the point of panic if you are paying attention. Programming in a functional style makes the state presented to your code explicit, which makes it much easier to reason about, and, in a completely pure system, makes thread race conditions impossible.

I do believe that there is real value in pursuing functional programming, but it would be irresponsible to exhort everyone to abandon their C++ compilers and start coding in Lisp, Haskell, or, to be blunt, any other fringe language.

Originally Posted by Alpo Oksaharju | Artist, Writer

The game world has dynamic day and night and weather cycles that create unique moods for every player. Player movement in the game is fully proactive, so one must read the world to understand what has happened and will happen.