After this question getting down voted and put on hold on programmers.stackexchange.com, I decided to take it here, as HN seems to be better suited for discussion about such a topic. Copy of the question: I have written a few small programs in Python and C++ and am currently learning F# (I am already quite familiar with FP concepts, as a result of reading the Learn you some Haskell tutorial until the monad part ;) ). And while I appreciate the elegance of functional programming in some situations, in other situations I just feel that it would be more natural to write a particular algorithm imperatively with mutation and I certainly can't imagine programming my Arduino board in a functional way for example. It often seems that today imperative programming is considered outdated and inferior to functional programming. So my question basically is: does imperative programming have a future outside of some niches? What do people with practical experience with both functional and imperative programming think? Will the programming world slowly shift to functional programming languages or will functional programming languages merely continue to influence imperative programming languages, leading to tacked on FP features (like in the latest versions of Java and C# and Ruby, Python etc.) or is functional programming in mainstream languages just a hype all together?