Git is a purely functional data structure (2013)
I sometimes like to explain things the other way around. Immutability being version control for program state.<p>I rarely use functional programming but I certainly see its appeal for certain things.<p>I think the concept of immutability confuses people. It really clicked for me when I stopped thinking of it in terms of things not being able to change and started instead to think of it in terms of each version of things having different names, somewhat like commits in version control.<p>Functional programming makes explicit, not only which variables you are accessing, but which version of it.<p>It may seem like you are copying variables every time you want to modify them but really you are just giving different mutations, different names. This doesn't mean things are actually copied in memory. The compiler doesn't need to keep every versions. If it sees that you are not going to reference a particular mutation, it might just physically overwrite it with the next mutation. In the background "var a=i, var b=a+j", might compile as something like "var b = i; b+=j";