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Comment by kyleburton | Hacker News Reader

I don't think FP is all about concurrency - it's about more than that. In my experience it reduces the possible bugs in code (type inference / checking, referential transparency) - these aspects make concurrency easier to achieve, but that's not all there is to FP.

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Unfortunately though, FP is being sold as panacea of concurrency problems, at least in Java world.

I think that FP is much more than that, it actually helps me solve problems in a very different and elegant way. I don't know how you classify this benefit but for me it was analogous to solving a problem with recursion or loop; while both can solve problems, recursion seems to be much more intuitive and elegant way - Same for FP vs Imperative approaches.

I think it's more that shared mutable everything can't possibly scale in parallel, rather than that FP is a panacea.

I'd agree to that, and solving problems in FP always made me think harder to get an elegant solution. Though, it also means that you're uncomfortably close to math. I think to fully exploit/understand FP, the programmer also needs to be good at understanding the mathematical models/formulas behind FP. Otherwise, I think he cannot truly exploit the potential of the tools he's using. I haven't spent a lot of time doing FP to justify that opinion fully, but whatever FP I did made me wish I took my math classes more seriously.

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