[1] Similarly in physics, when we observe a moving particle, we say that the position (state) of the particle is changing. However, from the perspective of the particle's world line in space-time there is no change involved.
[2] John Backus, the inventor of Fortran, gave high visibility to functional programming when he was awarded the ACM Turing award in 1978. His acceptance speech (Backus 1978) strongly advocated the functional approach. A good overview of functional programming is given in Henderson 1980 and in Darlington, Henderson, and Turner 1982.
[3] Observe that, for any two streams, there is in general more than one acceptable order of interleaving. Thus, technically, merge is a relation rather than a function—the answer is not a deterministic function of the inputs. We already mentioned (footnote 5) that nondeterminism is essential when dealing with concurrency. The merge relation illustrates the same essential nondeterminism, from the functional perspective. In section 4.3, we will look at nondeterminism from yet another point of view.
[4] The object model approximates the world by dividing it into separate pieces. The functional model does not modularize along object boundaries. The object model is useful when the unshared state of the objects is much larger than the state that they share. An example of a place where the object viewpoint fails is quantum mechanics, where thinking of things as individual particles leads to paradoxes and confusions. Unifying the object view with the functional view may have little to do with programming, but rather with fundamental epistemological issues.
3.5.5   Modularity of Functional Programs and Modularity of Objects