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.

一些想法:

The debate between FP and imperative programming (OO, structured, etc), has been raging since Lisp versus Fortran. I think you pose excellent questions but recognize that they are not especially new. Part of the hoopla over FP is that we seem to be recognizing that concurrency is very difficult, and that locks and other mechanisms in OO (e.g. Java) are just one solution. FP offers a refreshing sea change with ideas such as Actors and the power of stateless computing. To those wrestling with OO, the landscape seems highly appealing. Yes, schools teach FP. In fact, the University of Waterloo and others offer Scheme in first year classes (reference here). Regarding the average programmer, I'm sure that the same arguments were given against C++ back in the early 1990s. And look what happened. If businesses can gain an advantage via a technology, you can bet that people will receive training.

这并不是说这是板上钉钉的事，也不是说在3-5年内不会出现反弹(一如既往)。然而，朝着计划生育的趋势是有好处的，值得关注。

微软正在Visual Studio上大力推广f#的下一个版本。它是一种像Scala一样的混合语言，并且可以很好地与。net框架的其余部分集成。我认为许多微软公司将使用它来加速高度并行的数据处理应用程序和功能的开发。

我认为其中一个原因是有些人认为一门语言是否被接受最重要的部分是它有多好。不幸的是，事情很少这么简单。例如，我认为Python被接受的最大因素不是语言本身(尽管这非常重要)。Python如此受欢迎的最大原因是它庞大的标准库和更大的第三方库社区。

像Clojure或f#这样的语言可能是这个规则的例外，因为它们是构建在JVM/CLR之上的。因此，我没有答案。

我不认为函数式语言能解决任何问题，这只是管理层试图推销的一种炒作，记住唯一的事实:

没有灵丹妙药。

其余的都是胡扯，他们还说OO会解决我们的问题，Web服务会解决我们的问题，Xml会解决我们的问题，但最后上面的真理适用了，一切都失败了。而且，20年后，谁说我们还会使用二进制计算机呢?为什么不是量子计算机呢?没有人能预测未来，至少在这个星球上不能。(这是第二条真理)

我敢打赌，当你使用以下方法时，你并不知道你在进行函数式编程:

Excel公式 石英的作曲家 JavaScript Logo(海龟图形) LINQ SQL js(或Lodash)， D3