Revenge of the Lispers
What’s driving uptake of functional programming languages?
2 min readMar 10, 2014
The software industry is more oriented towards functional languages than ever in 2014.
What has caused the resurgence of functional programming in industry? I suspect that the following are the big factors:
- PG: Paul Graham’s strong influence on a decade’s worth of startups and hackers via Y Combinator, during a period of rapid development of new programming frameworks and willingness to experiment.
- VMs are the new normal: The long, continuous shift to VM-based runtimes (JVM, CLR, V8, LLVM, RPython toolchain), and huge progress in speed of these runtimes. This has opened up the market for languages, and reduced the old knee-jerk reactions against anything that doesn’t compile to machine code that used to dominate conversations about languages.
- Ruby’s functional flavour: Ruby’s functional aspects and popularity over the last decade have given devs a taste of functional techniques, causing them to dig deeper.
- MapReduce and Hadoop: Google’s widely-read MapReduce acted as a great “Hello World” type introduction to a couple of higher-order functions.
- Proliferation of DSLs: DSLs are a great gateway drug for functional programming, and they’ve become popular and common
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