The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (on linguistic determism) has been either
refuted outright (in its strong version), or shown to be essentially
devoid of content (weak version). In terms of programming languages,
you do not have to use (or to have ever even learned) a functional
programming language to apply the concepts of functional programming
(and s/functional/OO/). The programming language you choose (meaning
general purpose, not specialized niche languages here) doesn't limit
the solution set so much as it limits the solution set that can be
expressed naturally in that language. Think about it: C is not an OO
language, nor does it have hashes as a primary type; but with it you
can write new languages that do.
If anything, the Sapir-Whorf hyposthesis is simply backwards: What and
how we think shapes our language. The Innuit may have more words for
snow (but nowhere near the 40 or so claimed by some reports, more
like 7 to 10), but not more concepts or recognitions of different
kinds of snow. We just require more descriptive phrases where their
language uses simple or compound words. When differences in snow
types are a more important part of daily life, one might expect such
huffman-like encodings to be reflected in the language.
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