I think the entire time I've been on HN people have been saying everyone's just about to switch to functional programming. We've had a lot of advocacy for Haskell, Scala and F#, but no big switch. It's fairly obviously never going to happen at this point, but they still say it.
In the same time frame MVC has transformed web programming, with Django, Rails, Symfony & ASP.Net MVC all becoming a norm in web programming.
If functional programming really were that compelling, we'd have seen a similar switch by now. Instead what's happened is that all the main languages have adopted the best bits of functional programming and left the bits which make it hard to write large programs.
I think the entire time I've been on HN people have been saying everyone's just about to switch to functional programming. We've had a lot of advocacy for Haskell, Scala and F#, but no big switch. It's fairly obviously never going to happen at this point, but they still say it.
In the same time frame MVC has transformed web programming, with Django, Rails, Symfony & ASP.Net MVC all becoming a norm in web programming.
If functional programming really were that compelling, we'd have seen a similar switch by now. Instead what's happened is that all the main languages have adopted the best bits of functional programming and left the bits which make it hard to write large programs.