Anirban Shaw gives us the skinny:
In the ever-evolving landscape of software development, there exists a paradigm that has been gaining momentum and reshaping the way we approach coding challenges: functional programming.
In this article, we delve deep into the world of functional programming, exploring its advantages, core principles, origin, and reasons behind its growing traction.
I like this as an introduction to the topic, helping explain what functional programming languages are and why they’ve become much more interesting over the past 15-20 years. Anirban hits the topic of concurrency well, showing how a functional approach with immutable data makes it easy for multiple machines to work on separate parts of the problem independently and concurrently without error. I’d also add one more bit: functional programming languages tend to be more CPU-intensive than imperative languages, so in an era of strict computational scarcity, imperative languages dominate. With strides in computer processing, we tend to be CPU-bound less often, so the trade-off of some CPU for the benefits of FP makes a lot more sense. H/T R-Bloggers.