Re:Functional Programming Is Not Popular Because It Is Weird
by marcosdumay on Saturday February 27, 2016 @08:01PM
(#11189255)
Graphical interfaces pushed OOP into the mainstream. As plain structured programming was not powerful enough to create GUIs, people were forced to learn it.
The fact is, for an industry that talks so much about lifelong learning and innovation, software developers are very conservative.
The thing is, all the lucrative software engineering positions created in the late 90s required knowledge of OOP. Which meant that all the wannabe software engineers put in the time and effort to learn it, because that was how they could get a high-paying job. And so now you have a critical mass of people for whom OOP is second-nature, who can explain things to junior developers when they ask questions.
Follow the money. FP isn't popular because outside of certain niche domains (eg. high-assurance software), it doesn't provide a competitive advantage large enough to build billion-dollar industries off of. If knowledge of FP suddenly started becoming necessary to get a six-figure software engineering job, you'd see many more people putting in the effort to learn about FP concepts. (This may already be happening with React in web development, with Hadoop/Spark/MapReduce in big-data, and with Swift in iOS development, but it's a new trend that'll take years to mature.)