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It seems to me from my experimenting with Haskell, Erlang and Scheme that functional programming languages are a fantastic way to answer scientific questions. For example, taking a small set of data and performing some extensive analysis on it to return a significant answer. It's great for working through some tough Project Euler questions or trying out the Google Code Jam in an original way.
At the same time it seems that by their very nature, they are more suited to finding analytical solutions than actually performing practical tasks. I noticed this most strongly in Haskell, where everything is evaluated lazily and your whole program boils down to one giant analytical solution for some given data that you either hard-code into the program or tack on messily through Haskell's limited IO capabilities.
Basically, the tasks I would call 'practical' such as
Aceept a request, find and process requested data, and return it formatted as needed
seem to translate much more directly into procedural languages. The most luck I have had finding a functional language that works like this is Factor, which I would liken to a reverse-polish-notation version of Python.
So I am just curious whether I have missed something in these languages or I am just way off the ball in how I ask this question. Does anyone have examples of functional languages that are great at performing practical tasks or practical tasks that are best performed by functional languages?
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Advantages Of Functional Programming It improves modularity. It allows us to implement lambda calculus in our program to solve complex problems. Some programming languages support nested functions which improve maintainability of the code. It reduces complex problems into simple pieces.
Data isn't piped into a function and the result piped out, the functions affect the "global" state too. And it's this definition of "practical task" where functional programs start to fail. Writing a GUI in a functional program is pretty much impossible if you don't use their imperative extensions for example.
Efficiency issuesFunctional programming languages are typically less efficient in their use of CPU and memory than imperative languages such as C and Pascal. This is related to the fact that some mutable data structures like arrays have a very straightforward implementation using present hardware.
Regarding languages, I think F# is an example of a languages that's primarily 'functional' but also 'practical'. Scala and Clojure are probably others in this category.
(Going one level deeper, I think the 'formula for success' here is a language that leans strongly towards 'functional', but has access to vast practical libraries (e.g. .Net/JVM/some C FFI) and has good tooling (e.g. IDE support).)
I at least somewhat agree with the implicit premise of the question, namely that there is a tension between 'succinct/beautiful analytical power' and 'pragmatics'.
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