I am quite intrigued by functional programming and I spent a fair amount of time with Haskell. I believe that there are cases where functional programming shoul

I am quite intrigued by functional programming and I spent a fair amount of time with Haskell. I believe that there are cases where functional programming should be relevant, for example numerical software, where by definition you pickup an input once, do a lot of calculations and produce an output (think of lapack, or numerical functions). There is no event loop or continuously looking for input to adjust state. Shouldn’t functional languages be ideal in implementing such algorithms in a simple way and perform better than fortran? They clearly don’t thrive there, but they should. So in the end I got the impression that functional languages about the mental challenge of finding a non trivial problem that an a functional language can solve better than a more traditional language. It might be a form of art in programming: finding the best problem for the tool.