I really want to like functional programming, but the functional version of each of these seems less readable and more verbose.

This was exactly what I was thinking when I read the code. The goal should not be to remove loops. As a language construct there is nothing wrong with loops itself. The goal should be to make more readable and maintainable code, preferably without increasing verbosity. The functional alternatives posted here are not actually code quality improvements and should not be presented as such.

a-saleh

Well, it depends. I think the primary improvement is that loop is no longer a language construct. It is just another function. As a prime example I would take Clojure.

On first look: "No loops?" "This reduce functions everyhere look ugly."

On second look: "Oh, I can import paralel reduce instead of the single-threaded one?" [1] "Somebody created a library to transparently switch between local reduce and one using hadoop?" [2]

[1] http://clojure.org/reducers [2] https://github.com/aphyr/tesser