I encourage everyone who is still sitting on the fence about whether to learn a functional language to read this Beautiful Code – The Manifesto article written by Lau B. Jensen.
To summarize, his point of writing beautiful code essentially avoids a lot of the pitfalls you get from Imperative languages.
Beautiful Code is…
- Concise – Free from both obvious and hidden ceremony
- Expressive – Compartmental in its architecture, showing intent
- Safe – Being explicit about state and time, defaulting to immutability
Of course, functional languages do all that. Therefore, functional languages create beautiful code. Trust me, you want to learn a functional language.
Try Haskell for size and read this book Real World Haskell which is a fantastic book to learn Haskell.
Or learn F# for those in the Microsoft space. I highly recommend Chris Smith‘s Programming F# book to learn F#.