[Periodic]

I think the issue is not that there aren't applications, it's that people just aren't used to looking for them. As an example, let's think of classical geometry. They figured out the area of circles, the volumes of cones, etc without any calculus. If you know the tricks you can figure it out too, or you can just apply a little calculus and it just falls out. I feel that people dismiss the math as unnecessary because they can get by without it, but in reality the math is always there and sometimes provides much simpler solutions.

I've found over the last few years that my thinking has morphed from primarily OO to primarily functional. It isn't for lack of writing OO code, which I do professionally. I find that my brain loves to think in terms of functional transformations on classes of data types.

Suddenly I find myself noticing when things should be expressed as a monad or monoid. I also find myself thinking in type signatures for dynamic languages and silently cursing the language designer who decided a function can return null without warning. I see patterns in my code and find myself wishing I could overload the semi-colon to implement monadic behavior.