Why functional languages?
I see a lot of talk on here about functional languages and stuff. Why would you use one over a "traditional" language? What do they do better? What are they worse at? What's the ideal functional programming application?
Answer
Functional languages use a different paradigm than imperative and object-oriented languages. They use side-effect-free functions as a basic building block in the language. This enables lots of things and makes a lot of things more difficult (or in most cases different from what people are used to).
One of the biggest advantages with functional programming is that the order of execution of side-effect-free functions is not important. For example, in Erlang this is used to enable concurrency in a very transparent way. And because functions in functional languages behave very similar to mathematical functions it's easy to translate those into functional languages. In some cases, this can make code more readable.
Traditionally, one of the big disadvantages of functional programming was also the lack of side effects. It's very difficult to write useful software without IO, but IO is hard to implement without side effects in functions. So most people never got more out of functional programming than calculating a single output from a single input. In modern mixed-paradigm languages like F# or Scala this is easier.
Lots of modern languages have elements from functional programming languages. C# 3.0 has a lot functional programming features and you can do functional programming in Python too. I think the reasons for the popularity of functional programming is mostly because of two reasons: Concurrency is getting to be a real problem in normal programming because we're getting more and more multiprocessor computers; and the languages are getting more accessible.