 The world has changed a lot around functional programming. It's no longer considered weird or obscure to use functional programming. Most languages have embraced these kinds of ideas. My warning, my caveat, is if you're a Java programmer or you're a C++ programmer, and you think you're going to be able to learn functional programming by working in C++ or Java or JavaScript or any of these others, you're missing out on a lot of the benefits you could be getting. I recommend coming to a conference like this, picking up the books, learning a language. I prefer Haskell, but there are others. Picking up a language that's really going to force you into learning the functional programming idioms, refining them, even if you're going to end up going back and using a different language. That forced adoption, the fact that you're not going to have a mutable variable that you can escape to, that's going to change the way you write code in whatever language you go to next.