Algebra Driven Design
&gt; 10x is often cited as the magic number beyond which technology is good enough to overcome network effects. I&#x27;m personally convinced that functional programming is 10x better than any other paradigm I&#x27;ve tried<p>Better for who? Bad code that ships is better than good code that doesn&#x27;t. From a business perspective, I don&#x27;t care if it&#x27;s written in COBOL as long as it ships.<p>The critical missing piece in the functional argument is an example (or probably several) where a company using functional programming consistently outperformed one that wasn&#x27;t. By default, the business will be opposed to using anything that isn&#x27;t one of the big programming languages because haskell&#x2F;scala programmers are expensive. Why would I pay a bunch of expensive haskell programmers to build a chat app? I could build something that got me 80% of the way there for 30% of the cost.<p>I think Haskell can flourish in places where correctness matters - fintech, factory control systems, and weapons come to mind. But in the vast majority of places that employ programmers, correctness doesn&#x27;t actually matter. One argument for this is that requirements change so often that &quot;correct&quot; is impossible to define, so the overhead of being correct is actually a bug, not a feature.<p>With all that said, I do wish that we had better software, and that correctness mattered more. I like functional programming, and I think learning it can make any programmer better.