Reasoning behind the functional approach
Functional programming has been around for as long as other programming paradigms, for example, procedural and object-oriented programming. But in the past 15 years, it has gained significant momentum. The reason for this is that something else stalled: CPU speeds. We cannot speed up our CPUs as much as we did in the past, so we must parallelize our programs. And it turns out that the functional programming paradigm is exceptionally good at running parallel tasks.
The evolution of multicore processors is a fascinating topic in itself, but we'll cover it only briefly here. Workstations have had multiple processors since at least the 1980s to support the running of tasks from different users in parallel. Since workstations were massive during this era, they didn't need to worry about cramming everything into one chip. But when multiprocessors came to the consumer market around 2005, it became necessary to have one physical unit that...
