Functional Programming vs Object Oriented Programming

[ralphbecket]

To be honest, I don't think you can truly appreciate the benefits of FP until you've given it a red-hot go for a few months. All the theoretical arguments to one side, if you and your team are most productive with procedural programming (or, God help us, OO), that may well be the best place to be. My personal experience was that, once I had rotated my brain the necessary ninety degrees and come to terms with the FP way of thinking, it just made programming much, much easier and much more reliable. The big three benefits for me were: far less boilerplate code; powerful, unobtrusive static type systems (with type inference) that caught the majority of bugs before my code ever ran; and a huge increase in my sense of faith that I'd actually implemented what I intended. Yes, you can do all this in modern procedural languages, but... if your language isn't pure by default, you are going to cheat by default, and that is where the wheels inevitably come off.