[gen220]

I think your view’s totally reasonable. In my experience, the benefit of FP is To teach good program design: I’ve observed that functional programming languages encourage good practices that can be practiced in any language. For example: pushing I/O to the leaves of your program, dependency injection, eradicating global state, focus on functional interfaces.

These are patterns that you can do in any language, but functional languages kind of compel you to follow them. Many people first learned these patterns from FP, and carry them over to OOP, which they have to write at work.

I don’t know if there are many problems that are elegantly defined for FP, as you suggest. I think people just get comfortable in their cages. :)