Why Should I Learn Functional Programming?

Why should I learn functional programming?

Because then you literally have a job function.

I don't find that funny. I've heard that functional programming is harder than object oriented programming, so I need to hear a good reason to learn it.

Object oriented programming makes the code easier to understand by encapsulating the major components. Functional programming involves minimizing the number of major components.

That's a theoretical reason, not a practical one.

There are people who say you should learn functional programming for the purity.

You could say the same thing for Lisp or Scala, but they are like BSD -- a niche that has no practical value.

F# is a functional language by Microsoft.

Does anything they do work well?

One benefit of functional programming is that the order of the free functions doesn't matter much. This makes concurrent programming easier to implement.

Why does concurrent programming matter?

Whether you want to run a million calculations or handling hundreds of thousands of queries, you want to be able to run them simultaneously. Functional programming is ideal for multi-processor computers.

I've heard of the latest and greatest computers having quad core and eight core and even more hard core numbers.

Functional languages use free functions as the building block of the language instead of objects, streamlining code. It makes them more popular these days.

Functional programming is not getting more popular. It was the norm for forty years.

Because you have to create a new data structure, you make fewer mistakes.

You can make bad code in any language.

Functional programming lets you solve problems a variety of ways, but it becomes a nightmare when you need to decipher someone else's code.

You should create documentation no matter what language you are in.

Then there's no reason to learn functional programming, which gives you lots of job opportunities on both old and new systems.