First of all Java is becoming is functional. I dumped Java 9 years ago for groovy and grails for its functional flavour and meta programming capabilities resulting in less verbose and more readable code (Convincing customers that they get Java byte code that will run their Tomcat/JBoss servers). I am using Elixir and Phoenix now because of the same reasons. All our new products are being written using the power of Elixir OTP. In a way declarative programming is less confusing and more natural than Imperative programming.
