What are the benefits of functional programming? [closed]

Answer 1

A good starting point therefore would be to try to understand some things that are not possible in imperative languages but possible in functional languages.

If you're talking about computability, there is of course nothing that is possible in functional but not imperative programming (or vice versa).

The point of different programming paradigms isn't to make things possible that weren't possible before, it's to make things easy that were hard before.

Functional programming aims to let you more easily write programs that are concise, bug-free and parallelizable.

Answer 2

Do not think of functional programming in terms of a "need". Instead, think of it as another programming technique that will open up your mind just as OOP, templates, assembly language, etc may have completely changed your way of thinking when (if) you learned them. Ultimately, learning functional programming will make you a better programmer.

Answer 3

I think the most practical example of the need for functional programming is concurrency - functional programs are naturally thread safe and given the rise of multi core hardware this is of uttermost importance.

Functional programming also increases the modularity - you can often see methods/functions in imperative that are far too long - you'll almost never see a function more than a couple of lines long. And since everything is decoupled - re-usability is much improved and unit testing is very very easy.