I completely agree. I like how most responses to your rant hone in on the fact that it's a simple syntactic change, but utterly fail to get the point that composition of stateless functions a la Joy is totally magical, and opens up a whole world of possibilities that mutating, unchainable, uncomposable methods cannot.
For starters, and given that this is a thread about scientific computing, having stateless functions that mirror mathematical ones gives you robust, efficient approaches for parallelism and optimization that are completely lost (or horribly intractable) once you start boxing numeric types just so some OOPhead can put a dot after them.
For starters, and given that this is a thread about scientific computing, having stateless functions that mirror mathematical ones gives you robust, efficient approaches for parallelism and optimization that are completely lost (or horribly intractable) once you start boxing numeric types just so some OOPhead can put a dot after them.