[stickfigure]

It is useful for the vast majority of business processing. And, if John Carmack is to be believed, video game development.

Carmamack's post explains it - if you make a series of immutable "variables" instead of reassigning one, it is much easier to debug. This is a microcosm of time travel debugging; it lets you look at the state of those variables several steps back.

In don't know anything about your specific field but I am confident that getting to the point where you deeply understand this perspective will improve your programming, even if you don't always use it.