When Functional Programming Makes Sense

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know functional programming languages rank among the hottest languages used by so-called alpha geeks, writes Andrew Oliver. While this brave new world is upon us, and before we take things too far, it might be a good time to pause and reflect on the appropriateness of functional programming for everyday application development. ‘Functional programming addresses the concurrency problem of state but often at a cost of human readability. Functional programmming may be entirely appropriate for many circumstances. Ironically, it might even help bring computer and human languages closer together indirectly through defining domain-specific languages. But its difficult syntax makes it an extremely poor fit for general-purpose application programming. Don’t jump on this bandwagon just yet – especially for risk-averse projects.’