Does functional programming have any advantage in real environments?

I've been thinking about learning something new, so I went to Stack Overflow Surveys to see what technologies are people actually working on right now, and I saw this:

The top paying programming language is Clojure? Followed by F#, Elixir and Erlang, and a few positions below Scala and LISP, I'm impressed.

I don't have almost any knowledge in functional programming, I've heard that has better performance in certain situations (like managing big data), is more predictable, and more readable, but I don't see real use cases for functional programming instead of a traditional approach.

What are the advantages of the functional paradigm? In what situations are this languages used? For someone that wants to learn something new, what language do you recommend to learn first? I thought about Haskell or Clojure.

Thanks!