In a world where your two options are object-oriented and functional, functional is naturally superior. But just because the last twenty years have had all the oxygen sucked up by object-oriented does not mean there are no alternatives to it other than functional. Like all good IEEE articles, it's seven years out of date: Rust is one of the most maintainable languages around, simply by embracing good old fashioned procedural programming. And the only practical example they give, null pointers, have been a solved problem outside FP for an even longer time.