Throughout my life, I've often considered what would truly outrage and incense me. Windows Vista? Nay, for it evolved into beloved Windows 7. Soccer? Of course not, it led me to the violent agony and beauty of Rugby. The Sword going from heavy metal to funk? Maybe a little, but I'm cool, man, far out.No, it turns out functional programming evangelists are what it takes to send me into a blind, seething rage. Enter Maxine. Maxine is a genius. We are told this very often throughout the "story". I'm using this term loosely, you understand. Maxine is a genius and not afraid to tell her boss what she thinks. After getting blamed for a project faltering, Maxine dwells on her experience and vast, deep expertise. She was the most sought-after consultant at the top Fortune 50 companies. Maxine is a real-life legend.Sheâ€™s written graphic processing software, algorithms for CAD software, back-end software for MMOs, and MRP systems. For fun, she watches lectures on mathematics and computer science via â€œPapers We Loveâ€ and engages in solving Turing machine/NP-complete problems. If this sounds like buzzword hell, well, just you wait! The slew of technology jargon doesnâ€™t stop here. When starting her new role, sheâ€™s baffled that her developer computer doesnâ€™t have things like Docker and Visio!Maxine hasnâ€™t just done epic computer science and software engineering tasks, no, sheâ€™s repaired RAID arrays, middleware servers, and a network switch duplexing problem. She has literally â€œdeciphered stack traces on application servers that were literally on fireâ€. Literally. On. Fire.Then, it happens. If the foul stench of something troubling afoot hasnâ€™t hit you yet, then I applaud you. Nevertheless, Maxine shows her hand:â€œSheâ€™s a developer who loves functional programming because she knows that pure functions and composability are better tools to think with. She eschews imperative programming in favor of declarative modes of thinking. She despises and has a healthy fear of state mutation and non-referential transparency. She favors the lambda calculus over Turing machines because of their mathematical purity. She loves LIPSs because she loves her code as data and vice versa.â€If I may:Just lmao.This bias and borderline propaganda stays with us throughout the â€œnovelâ€. Later, Maxine visits a computer lab she helped build at her childrenâ€™s school. There are two girls there, diligently writing Python. When Maxine enters, they rejoice (and why wouldnâ€™t you? The messiah of computer science and systems engineering has just blessed you with her presence). The children are having an issue with their code, and Maxine immediately notices there are indentation errors. The girls are receptive of her assistance, much to the chagrin of Maxine because they address her with reverence and respect, which makes her feel old. Maxine educates the girls on spamming the build/run command on their text editor, so they donâ€™t have to learn proper debugging skills.The girls encounter another error, at which point Maxine condescendingly explains the error, and then goes on to reflect on a time she used her Godlike powers to build a database driver in the middle of the night and submit it to the vendor. At which point, of course, the vendors begged her to work for them, but she refused. In victory and defeat, well, letâ€™s be honest, Maxine is never defeated: In victory and in victory, Maxine is forever humble.Rather than inform the girls how to remedy and prevent off-by-one errors, she demonstrates an expensive alternative that eliminate their loop. Wow, Maxine, way to keep the people down.She goes on to espouse her functional programming nonsense again, citing that she eliminated 95% of her programming errors by learning Clojure.â€œFunctional programming is truly a better tool to think with.â€If this reads like Iâ€™m being pedantic, petty, and preposterous, itâ€™s because I am. However, much like Han Solo and Greedo, I donâ€™t want to leave up any interpretation as to who shot first. We learn what a bastion of engineering prowess Maxine is, butâ€¦ Sadly, something as simple and concise as git baffles her.â€œâ€¦Git can be scary and hard! What other tool uses SHA-1 hashes as part of its UI?â€So, we read through pages of bluster and boasting, only to find out that the Mighty Maxine canâ€™t handle version control. Yet her epiphanies, experience, and profound insight (often through Deus Ex Machina) are more than enough to save a tanking company from being chop shopped and sold for parts. Maxine is a character that has no bearing on reality and is completely unrelatable. She does have a puppy, though.The rest of the book attempts to piece and click together scenes from the last book (this is a sequel, by the way) as well as bring new life into an existing money maker. Characters are inconsistent, there is a ton of retcon, and the quality is night and day compared to the first book. I hate to be that guy. I loved Dark Souls II. I loved Attack of the Clones. I enjoy sequels. But this was a clear attempt at a cash grab on previous success. This combined with Maxineâ€™s character and the utter propaganda of how functional programming is a magical black box that solves all your problems is what prompted me to write a review. This is worse than Blizzardâ€™s flop of Warcraft III: Reforged. Yes, I said it.The Unicorn Project is a slap in the face of what The Phoenix Project stood for. Itâ€™s offensive, in the literal sense, and it reads like the wet dream of a compsci professor that never worked a real job in their life. Whereas Phoenix was applicable and relatable, Unicorn serves as just that: Fantasy.