 My connection with functional programming is about 10 years ago, 12 years ago, I really started to do some kind of searching to find out what the next language was that I was going to be working in, where I felt comfortable producing code, producing commercial code that I could put my name to, that I thought this code was going to be reliable, this code was going to work, it was going to be fast enough, and I had been doing Java for quite a few years. I got scared off from Java at some point, decided to start exploring a little bit further, went into PHP, went into Pearl, went all over the place, and eventually I found this weird language called Haskell that most people I hadn't heard of, and of course that was alluring because it was different, and they said it was mathematical and I didn't really know what that meant, but that sounded interesting, so I decided to get into it and I found this language that really appealed to me, and it took a while to get used to it, especially the material at the time was incomplete, let's say. There was a lot of training material available, and a lot of the concepts that existed in Haskell hadn't really become mainstream, so today, the young people today, everyone who's watching this, they're probably already used to this concept of promises and the idea that you can bind one promise to another in JavaScript, and a lot of people are already familiar with, oh that's like a monad, that's that thing, but I was terrified of that when I first got started. It was completely different, the world was the wild west of functional programming, so I decided to persevere because I'm a stubborn person and I got into it and turned out that I really like this thing. I think I'm a little unusual in this functional programming side of things because the thing about functional programming that I like most is not the functional programming, I love the strong static types, the guarantees of safety that I'm able to get out of the system, and I've tried to design my software, my libraries to encourage that kind of development. Immutability, functional, function chaining, composition, all those kinds of things that exist in functional programming are great, and I love taking advantage of them, but the one that always pulls me back in the most is the strong static typing. I can get along with the people who are, you know, not such fans of that, and I'm able to work with the other libraries, but that's the part of FP, which isn't technically FP that I'm a really big fan of.