Functional Programming: Failed Successfully by Alexander Granin

Alexander Granin discusses the Haskell Superiority Paradox and how functional programming failed to achieve mainstream language dominance but successfully influenced modern languages.

Functional Programming: Failed Successfully by Alexander Granin at #LambdaConf2024 Get your ticket for #LambdaConf2025 here: eventbrite.com/e/lambdaconf-2025-tickets-903567092497 Alexander recently coined a term: "Haskell Superiority Paradox". If this language was so advanced and superior compared to other languages, why didn't we see its wide adoption in the industry? To him, this was a total failure. But the world didn't end on Haskell. There was Scala, there was Clojure, Erlang, F#, OCaml. If we took functional programming (FP) in general, we saw that in reality, functional programming was everywhere. This was a clear trend in C++ last decade, FP was very essential for JavaScript and C#, we saw the rise of Rust, the language that borrowed so much from functional languages. Functional Programming had definitely found its path to the industry.