I can't help but agree with this post. In fact, my university makes it a standard to teach Functional Programming via Haskell, it makes sense.

The trend in programming language design seems to be running away from mathematics and complex problems, however the moment you remove these aspects from a language the more error prone or resource heavy they become.

In fact, I'd like to add that, despite believing that side effects and global state is essential for programming, we cannot simply ignore functional programming, instead we should look to solve these problems and write error free code from a mathematical viewpoint, thinking functional and then imperatively or object oriented or whatever.