I spent some time looking at this library. I'm looking at the documentation in release 1.36 for phoenix in the spirit library documentation. Here are a few observations: I don't really know enough about functional programming in order to write a revew. My perspective is of someone who is interested in this subject and wants to use phoenix as a vehicule to learn more about it and experiment with it to see to what extent it can help me with the programming problems that I come upon in my daily work. I don't like the current trend in assigning "cute" names to libraries. E.G. spirit, phoenix, proto, xpressive, oven, - I'm sure there are others. The universe libraries is sufficiently large that given a problem, I'm included to scan a list of library names and drill down into those whose names suggest they might help on my current problem. These names don't help me with that. I don't expect anyone to change a current name, and It's not a huge issue - but it is a minor annoyance. When I perused the library documentation, I was left with the idea that I had a general understanding of what it does and that I could make use of it should I decide to. This struck a very positive note for me. However, I would much like to see a few simple examples of complete applications which show how the library can actually shorten/and/or improve the final result. The "First Practical Example" is too trivial and it seems to be the only real example. After writing the above, I looked up the references cited in the documentation. I found that I had the same complaint about most of them. The John Hughes paper (1989!) did have some interesting examples. Maybe implementing the newton-raphson method on in terms of phoenix might have helped me. Robert Ramey