Hello all, first time poster, short time user here. I'm not a programmer by any stretch, so my questions are surely going to be pretty ignorant.

Ever since I picked up Pico-8, I've been approaching my programming in a functional matter because it helps me reason about my program, reuse code, and all that fancy compositional stuff that comes for free with functional design. That's not because I'm smart or anything, I just ended up learning some Haskell and now I'm used to thinking functionally.

Anyway, imperative programming is a little foreign to me, but I've always heard people insist that functional programming is inefficient. That's definitely a myth in the compiled world, but I assume that there must be some truth to it if I just go around naively composing functions together in Lua without any idea of what's going on in the metal.

Are there any good resources out there for how to use functional patterns without breaking things down the road? What drawbacks are there to passing arguments through a long chain of functions, instead of just mutating state like the cool imperative kids do? I'll come back with some of my own (ugly) code samples to be a little more specific.

Cheers!