[andrewvijay]

The more I read about functional programming the more I question why are things this hard in traditional oops. If so many people have been doing oops for so many years then it must have something that is easy to pick up or something that is easier to work with. But after doing some functional programming the number of lines are painfully less and the code is easier to understand. I was thinking may be I was giving too much credit to FP but I was not it's simply just the way things are. But why has FN been used only as an academic tool and not as a goto programming paradigm? Can someone shed some light on this?

[lostcolony]

Broad generalizations here, but from my understanding -

Back in the dark ages, the performance difference between imperative code and functional code was too large for FP to gain much traction outside of academic circles.

By the time the hardware was anywhere near reasonable, OO had become a thing. People missed some of the key points Alan Kay had, latching on to the one thing that was immediately understandable: objects could model the nouns of your problem domain. That popularity meant that the mainstream was focused on OO, rather than FP.

I went through college in the late 2000s, at a well respected university, for computer science. I had classes devoted to OO(A/D/P); I had none devoted to FP. If you were exposed to it, it was via having to learn a Lisp in the AI class, or similar.

[andrewvijay]

Okay. That's a great way to put it.

[nv-vn]

Historically, mostly performance. Outside of academia, performance becomes an important factor in most programs. In the past, both slower computers and fewer optimizations made implementing the abstractions of functional programming ridiculously costly. Once it lost out to imperative programming, it only got harder to change the tide. Performance is now adequate but functional languages lack educational material and libraries as well as industry support.