Some of the practical aspects that favour functional programming lies in parallelism, not concurrent programming. Parallelism as in multi threading. It's an order of magnitude easier to write parallel programs in Scala than in Java. I don't mean a simple hello world but real world applications which will involve transactions and potential deadlocks. Agree Yes, the parallel constructs in Scala work with Java threads underneath, but you write a lot less code.

I don't think Functional programming makes any task easier. In fact I'd argue the opposite, it's quite difficult to write functional code, to unlearn imperative programming. Once you gain mastery over FP, you do write less code. Reaching that level of mastery is an uphill task, it has been for me at least.