Maybe it ought to be but it definitely isn't if you look at success as industry adoption.
The author seems to have good intentions and covers all the talking points a new convert will discover on their own.
However I'm afraid an article like this will do more harm than good in the end. There are too many network effects in play that go against a new paradigm supplanting the mainstream as it is. And the benefits of functional programming pointed out in this article haven't been convincing over the last... many decades. Without large, industry success stories to back it up I'm afraid any amount of evangelism, however good the intention of the author, is going to fall before skeptical minds.
It doesn't help that of the few empirical studies done none have shown any impressive results that hold up these claims. Granted those studies are few and far between and inconclusive at best but that won't stop skeptics from using them as ammunition.
For me the real power of functional programming is that I can use mathematical reasoning on my programs and get results. It's just the way my brain works. I don't think it's superior or better than procedural, imperative programming. And heck there are some problem domains where I can't get away from thinking in a non-functional programming way.
I think the leap to structured programming was an event that is probably only going to happen once in our industry. Aside from advances in multi-core programming, which we've barely seen in the last couple of decades, I wouldn't hold out for functional programming to be the future of the mainstream. What does seem to be happening is that developments in pure functional programming are making their way to the entrenched, imperative, procedural programming languages of the world.
A good talk, Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm?
The author seems to have good intentions and covers all the talking points a new convert will discover on their own.
However I'm afraid an article like this will do more harm than good in the end. There are too many network effects in play that go against a new paradigm supplanting the mainstream as it is. And the benefits of functional programming pointed out in this article haven't been convincing over the last... many decades. Without large, industry success stories to back it up I'm afraid any amount of evangelism, however good the intention of the author, is going to fall before skeptical minds.
It doesn't help that of the few empirical studies done none have shown any impressive results that hold up these claims. Granted those studies are few and far between and inconclusive at best but that won't stop skeptics from using them as ammunition.
For me the real power of functional programming is that I can use mathematical reasoning on my programs and get results. It's just the way my brain works. I don't think it's superior or better than procedural, imperative programming. And heck there are some problem domains where I can't get away from thinking in a non-functional programming way.
I think the leap to structured programming was an event that is probably only going to happen once in our industry. Aside from advances in multi-core programming, which we've barely seen in the last couple of decades, I wouldn't hold out for functional programming to be the future of the mainstream. What does seem to be happening is that developments in pure functional programming are making their way to the entrenched, imperative, procedural programming languages of the world.
A good talk, Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4