Why do companies fail at adopting Functional Programming?

According to the NDC Oslo talk Lean and Functional Programming by Bryan Hunter, these are the reasons why companies fail to adopt FP:

• They say “our developers aren’t smart enough” (to use F#, Erlang) [they should invest in their education!]
• Culture of hiding problems => little incentive to adopt a paradigm that solves/prevents them if they’re invisible
• Overburden => not time
• Implementing changes (FP) without first proving them (PDCA) – blindly rewriting something in F#/… can fail; it’s better to have a value-proposition hypothesis and prove it with a limited experiment first
• The prioritise short-term (e.g. fire-fighting) over long-term (removing the root causes of problems)

Tip for driving FP adoption: Find a pragmatist in pain – e.g. a business person experiencing problems that FP could have prevented.