Functional programming concepts and functional programming itself are currently all over the news. Languages such as Clojure are leading the way by providing interoperability and state of the art CASE tools. With existing libraries and frameworks, an alternative approach to state management and concurrency as well as growing groups of advocates, you could think that this is yet again the answer to all your problems. Many languages are adopting some functional concepts like functions as first class values, type inference and others to please developers and (hopefully) improve the languages’ expressiveness.