Except the papercraft thing is meant to be an extra challenge, whereas functional programming has some practical advantages. Limiting to the bare minimum of just folding, not allowing things that would make it easier like glue or cutting, doing it without practical purpose but just to make impressive creations? I think the direct programming equivalent would be esoteric programming languages like brainfuck.
Limiting to the bare minimum of just folding, not allowing things that would make it easier like glue or cutting, doing it without practical purpose but just to make impressive creations?
My first experience with functional programming was being quizzed to solve certain maths problems with Haskell, and not being allowed to save intermediate results in a variable like an integer was really frustrating due to existing habits. Yes, yes, accumulators and recursion - point is our instructor gave us zero hints about how to think differently, and just kept saying "no, Haskell has no variables."
It might say more about how poorly guided my first encounter with functional programming was, but still, I'd say that is a lot like what you just described.
