I'm with you so far. As an (originally) low-level programmer, I learned to deal first with state machines and performance, so functional programming looks sort

I'm with you so far. As an (originally) low-level programmer, I learned to deal first with state machines and performance, so functional programming looks sort of ivory tower and meaningless. However, trying to get things to work efficiently in parallel on clusters of multicore machines, working mostly in Python, the issues I think FP tries to address are starting to come into focus. I once sat through a 2 hour seminar just to hear Guido Van Rossum talk about parallelization in Python. When it came time for him to speak, he said something like "I don't know why I was invited -- I neither care nor think very much about parallelism". This was sort of amusing. Note his comments on tail recursion elsehwere on YC.