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In theory. Practice has proven messier to many. Maybe some have a "functional mind", but they shouldn't extrapolate their head to others. Functional has been around for 60+ years. If it were the magical productivity and Lego-modularity golden hammer, it would have mainstreamed already. (Long LINQ is also hard to debug for many of us.)

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It is becoming mainstream. Not by pure functional languages taking over, but by developers adopting a functional style and by better and better support for functional programming in mainstream languages.

I'm not sure I'd agree. A lot of the use-cases are for niches or systems programming. I don't see it for business CRUD that often unless either the framework forces it on one, or they are using LINQ, which as I pointed out, can be tricky to debug if long. SQL is largely functional, but it's also hard to debug. The addition of the WITH clause to SQL greatly helped, as one can paste sections to test. Still, not as x-ray-able as imperative. Imperative still wins most x-ray contests. Maybe fast code readers don't need debugging as often? Could be, but I'm average at it.

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