Does Functional Programming Matter to You?

FP is pretty cool. I mainly do scripting work though (lots of scripts that usually aren't longer than a few pages) and found there aren't many functional first languages that meet the niche Python does. I've played with Haskell, OCaml, Clojure, F#...etc and just found the ecosystems to be a pain and that for my niche...they didn't add value compared to my usual setup. I will say FP has taught me to avoid complicated state changes a lot more, so that is good.

I have found APL (array based) and Forth (concatenative paradigm) to both be pretty similar to FP if you squint and those are better for my needs and easier to understand without the math. The problem though is that although many open source versions of these languages exist, the best are proprietary/commercial. They're fairly cheap compared to most commercial software that I deal with, but still closed source and require a license, which is just a hassle for some uses.