The author&#x27;s attempt to rewrite the cake recipe in a functional style misunderstands the paradigm completely.<p>The correct image here is all the stuff -- oven, pans, butter, flour, salt, etc -- entering a funnel on the left and producing a baked cake on the right.  The funnel itself, if you were to peer inside it, would be composed of multiple sub-funnels: pans with batter + oven as the last step, empty pans and bowls of batter as the step before that, and so on.<p>It&#x27;s natural, not weird.  The metaphor is used all the time on cooking shows, where they show you bowls of all the ingredients, and the final product next to them.