Ok. Can you give me an example of any FP objects/tools which are useful? By useful I mean it would make my life (as a coder of short research oriented programs) easier. Similar to how learning OOP made it easier to keep track of all the moving parts in my code?
One example is streaming. Streams allow for a near infinite array size to be processed, because it works on one element at a time as it comes in. Streams come from the FP world.
From that function chaining originates from the FP world and is used in modern languages like Python quite heavily.
You mentioned research, so a valid example of this is the difference between Spark and MapReduce. Spark was introduced to optimize processing large sets of data, by streaming it. MapReduce does not.
For a more heavy example, a few data structures that are quite powerful come from the FP world. For example, this cppcon talk is introduces one, which gives near O(1) time for all uses (insert, delete, lookup, ...), and can be used in a thread safe way: https://youtu.be/sPhpelUfu8Q
