Is there a difference between this and functional programming? It's odd that this article doesn't mention the entire branch of programming it is talking about.
I believe I didn't want to scare readers away. But more importantly, functional programming is more than just removing the assignment statement. If you take a language and just remove the assignment statement, the language you get isn't functional, it's just crippled.
Functional programming involves other techniques to compensate. Higher order functions are critical, and often used to hide recursion under the rug (see map & reduce). I have a more complete guide to functional programming there: http://loup-vaillant.fr/tutorials/from-imperative-to-functio...
