Thomas Much

Reading functional code definitely needs some practice! But then the "what" (what steps are computed) is often more clearly to see than the "how" (how is the algorithm implemented in detail) in imperative style.

Of course there's always a tradeoff between conciseness and readability. And if conciseness is the only advantage, I'd always prefer readability. (And what readability means has to be decided by every different team that works on some codebase.)

But in this example I really prefer the expressiveness of the functional Java code! If you compare this example with one of its imperative solutions, it can be quite tricky to understand /what/ the imperative code actually does.