Yesterday I linked to Uncle Bob’s intro to functional programming. There are some interesting reactions floating around today. Tim Bray agrees that FP is important, but doesn’t like the magical example or the fact that it’s written in Lisp. The reliably cranky Cédric Beust pushes back on the article with vigor, mainly on the point that functional programming is the “next big thing” in software engineering.
For what it’s worth, I think that functional programming is worth learning more about because it will make you a better programmer in whatever language you use, not because one day you’ll be using FP and abandoning the use of mutable variables.