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I have an unfortunate and periodic question about functional languages and their appropriate problem domains. More specifically, what makes them unsuitable for physical modelling? Looking at instructional texts, scientific and engineering codes, etc, there's little evidence that functional programming has been used widely or successfully in this domain and I've never found a coherent explanation of the techniques advantages or disadvantages in this domain.

Much of this comes down to my limited experience so I'm actively trying to work against that. Still, with all the hype around FP, the way functional features are uncomfortably crowbarred into every facet of computing, I don't find them helpful at all in solving the problems I regularly face in my problem domain. They seem diversionary, obtuse, and simply inappropriate and I'm trying to sort out why; is this my perception or are there material technical reasons for this 'impedance mismatch' between FP and the practice of engineering?