[m_mueller]

Coming from HPC, I think imperative programming will stay as long as we don't have an AGI that does the actual programming for us, as it's the model with the highest possible abatraction that still gives you the whole truth about the underlying memory operations (and thus allows you to optimize for it without having your hands tied behind your back and just trusting the compiler gods). Not saying that this is how one should usually program in a context where performance is not the highest goal, but there's always going to be these usecases.

[jonahx]

Agreed. That said, the problem is that imperative programming is still used widely in contexts (eg, 95% of web programming) where performance is not an issue and high-level abstractions such as those used in FP are more appropriate. This is almost entirely due, imo, to the paradigm's inertia and to bad education.