在我看来，那些从未在本科阶段学习过Lisp或Scheme的人现在正在发现它。与这个领域的许多事情一样，有一种炒作和创造高期望的倾向……

一切都会过去的。

函数式编程很棒。然而，它不会统治世界。C、c++、Java、c#等语言仍将存在。

我认为这会带来更多的跨语言能力——例如，用函数式语言实现一些东西，然后用其他语言访问这些东西。

FP无疑是下一个最佳范例。现在哪种语言可能是下一步，这是很难的东西，但我相信可能是Haskell, f#， Clojure, Ocaml或Erlang。或者是带有更多FP结构和更好的并行性/性能支持的Python，或者是带有parrot的Perl 6，看起来非常有趣。

我一定是糊涂了，但我还是不明白。是否有像f#这样的函数式语言编写的小型应用程序的实际例子，你可以查看源代码，并了解如何以及为什么使用这种方法比c#更好?

我一直对“下一件大事”持怀疑态度。很多时候，下一个大事件纯粹是历史的偶然，无论技术好坏，它都在正确的时间出现在正确的地点。例如:c++， Tcl/Tk, Perl。所有的技术都是有缺陷的，都非常成功，因为它们被认为要么解决了当时的问题，要么与根深蒂固的标准几乎相同，或者两者兼而有之。函数式编程可能确实很棒，但这并不意味着它会被采用。

But I can tell you why people are excited about functional programming: many, many programmers have had a kind of "conversion experience" in which they discover that using a functional language makes them twice as productive (or maybe ten times as productive) while producing code that is more resilient to change and has fewer bugs. These people think of functional programming as a secret weapon; a good example of this mindset is Paul Graham's Beating the Averages. Oh, and his application? E-commerce web apps.

自2006年初以来，也有一些关于函数式编程和并行的讨论。因为像Simon Peyton Jones这样的人至少从1984年开始就一直在担心并行性，所以在函数式语言解决多核问题之前，我不会屏住呼吸。但它确实解释了目前一些额外的话题。

In general, American universities are doing a poor job teaching functional programming. There's a strong core of support for teaching intro programming using Scheme, and Haskell also enjoys some support there, but there's very little in the way of teaching advanced technique for functional programmer. I've taught such a course at Harvard and will do so again this spring at Tufts. Benjamin Pierce has taught such a course at Penn. I don't know if Paul Hudak has done anything at Yale. The European universities are doing a much better job; for example, functional programming is emphasized in important places in Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK. I have less of a sense of what's happening in Australasia.

它已经在Hadoop中的Map/reduce中流行起来

我不认为函数式编程方法“流行起来”有任何问题，因为它(作为一种编程风格)已经被使用了大约40年。每当OO程序员编写有利于不可变对象的干净代码时，这些代码就是借用了函数概念。

然而，这些天来，强制函数式风格的语言正在获得大量的虚拟墨水，这些语言是否会在未来占据主导地位是一个悬而未决的问题。我自己的怀疑是混合的、多范式的语言，如Scala或OCaml 将很可能统治“纯粹的”函数语言，就像纯粹的OO语言(Smalltalk、Beta等)影响了主流编程一样，但还没有成为最广泛使用的表示法。

最后，我忍不住要指出，你对FP的评论与我几年前从过程程序员那里听到的评论高度相似:

(恕我直言，这是神话)“普通”程序员不理解它。 这并没有被广泛教授。 任何你能用它来写的程序，都能用现有的技术以另一种方式来写。

Just as graphical user interfaces and "code as a model of the business" were concepts that helped OO become more widely appreciated, I believe that increased use of immutability and simpler (massive) parallelism will help more programmers see the benefits that the functional approach offers. But as much as we've learned in the past 50 or so years that make up the entire history of digital computer programming, I think we still have much to learn. Twenty years from now, programmers will look back in amazement at the primitive nature of the tools we're currently using, including the now-popular OO and FP languages.