Why do we need functional programming?

 Up until this semester I had no clue about what the functional programming pardagim consisted of and from what others had told me, I've got to admit I had my reservations about it. A paradigm in which variables aren't a thing and no for loops or whiles and also no side effects seemed too abstract for me, I wasn't sure what I could do with it to create useful code. To be honest until this day I'm not quite certain of the full potential of functional programming and how could I use it moving on in my professional career, but after reading this article and learning more about languages such as Clojure, I begin to understand more of what I could possibly do.

 What the article states early on is that not only is this paradigm one that has been in use since the beginning of computing, but also the different applications it can have are countless, it just needs a little bit more support and studying.  The features to take away are how straightforward it is, how easy it is to read code and also how it is easier as a tester to check for correctness in the code. 

Among other things, paralellism support and funtional abstractions are other features from which a programmer can benefit and use to its full potential, the concept of high order functions is very important and lets us do a variety of things that would take a lot more lines in an imperative paradigm. 

As a conclusion I would say that functional programming is very useful to read code clearly, create concise and free of side effects code and also optimize hardware when its necessary.