Stephan van Hulst wrote:Randall, I think you're already late to the game. Functional programming has been important since the 50's.
That depends what your definition of "important" is exactly...
Most mainstream programming languages since the end of the 1980's have been object oriented programming languages, for example C++ and Java.
The last 4 or 5 years functional programming has been getting a lot of attention. The main reason for this is that computers are getting more parallel - even your phone today has a quadcore or even 8-core CPU nowadays, and functional programming is built upon principles that make it very well suited for parallel programming, such as immutable data structures.
The thing that makes parallel programming hard is having mutable state - if multiple threads can modify a data structure at the same time, you'd have to be very careful with synchronization, and it's easy to introduce non-obvious bugs or potential deadlock situations. If everything is immutable, then multiple threads will never modify the same data structure, and you eliminate the hardest problem of parallel programming.
It's also fun and interesting to learn about functional programming, as Randall has noticed (he's been looking at some functional programming languages lately) it's a whole new world that you didn't know even existed.