I’ll bite. I haven’t done huge dives into it, but I’ve definitely gone through the Learn F# interactive tutorial and spent some time working through some Scala lessons a while ago. I would love to be doing more FP work just because of the testimonials of others in how it has improved their craft.

The most difficult thing thus far has been that I haven’t seen where many of the more interesting FP concepts fit into my daily programming efforts. I am most frequently working on LOB applications, mobile apps, or backend APIs. It’s very much the world of take a model, do something to it, and return it. I know that it comes with practice, but often times the cool chaining and currying concepts, FP modifiers (except for map and a couple other simple functions) just don’t seem to apply when I think about the problems I’m trying to solve. The tutorials often lack any real-world examples, focusing more on math problems or “not real data” uses.

That being said, one of the biggest things that I have taken away is the idea that, given the same inputs a function should always return the same outputs, and be free of outside state. That has definitely helped me improve my coding.