Revenge of the Lispers

What’s driving uptake of functional programming languages?

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

Lots of DSL-focused projects on Github

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