[tormeh]

They're easier and faster to develop in. Remember that the scripts usually only need to be run once - maintainability is irrelevant.

I don't think this all of the difficulty is intrinsic to FP, but FP language designers don't usually care about newbie-friendliness. The closest thing to a user-friendly FP language I know about is Scala, and it, too, has lots and lots of arbitrary symbols and hideously complicated function signatures.

Remember, the typical scientist has no patience for monads, currying, inscrutable value names or functions-as-arguments and compiler complaints about function signatures are more likely to instill deep hatred than anything else.

I know it's an extreme example, but a statistician will never try to understand what something like "def map[B, That](f: A => B)(implicit bf: CanBuildFrom[Repr, B, That]): That" means, he'll just move on to a language that's easier.