For some historical context, the late 90's/early 2000's was a time when Java/J2EE and the n-tier architecture were absolutely dominant in the startup world, and the ideas of functional programming were considered academic or outdated. Saying the word "closure" to most programmers back then would give you the same suspicious look you'd get for saying "monad" today. At least that was my experience as a junior programmer bouncing between web startups in those days.

In retrospect, the J2EE hype was wildly overblown, optimized for problems nobody needed solving, and introduced unnecessary complexity and boilerplate at every level of the stack. I can only imagine how frustrating it was to have a full understanding of how bad the status quo was, yet have your alternatives dismissed out of hand because "not Java".

I remember thinking people like Paul Graham[0] and Phil Greenspun[1] were pretty brave for going against the J2EE dogma--to suggest that these "little languages" not only had interesting properties, but should actually be used in production. I found their arguments convincing, but didn't have the guts to push for them at work.

[0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Philip-Alexs-Guide-Web-Publishing/dp/...

After all these years, this is still on my PDA. And this:

http://www.amazon.com/Philip-Alexs-Guide-Web-Publishing/dp/1...

is still on my coffee table.

(I'm still trying to figure out which chapters the dog wrote.)