Why hasn't functional programming taken over yet?

Posted by pankrax on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by pankrax
Published on 2010-05-14T16:24:03Z Indexed on 2010/05/14 16:34 UTC
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functional-programming

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subjective

I've read some texts about declarative/functional programming (languages), tried out Haskell as well as written one myself. From what I've seen, functional programming has several advantages over the classical imperative style:

Stateless programs; No side effects
Concurrency; Plays extremely nice with the rising multi-core technology
Programs are usually shorter and in some cases easier to read
Productivity goes up (example: Erlang)
Imperative programming is a very old paradigm (as far as I know) and possibly not suitable for the 21st century

Why are companies using or programs written in functional languages still so "rare"?

Why, when looking at the advantages of functional programming, are we still using imperative programming languages?

Maybe it was too early for it in 1990, but today?

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