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copied!<p>I'm always skeptical about the Next Big Thing. Lots of times the Next Big Thing is pure accident of history, being there in the right place at the right time no matter whether the technology is good or not. Examples: C++, Tcl/Tk, Perl. All flawed technologies, all wildly successful because they were perceived either to solve the problems of the day or to be nearly identical to entrenched standards, or both. Functional programming may indeed be great, but that doesn't mean it will be adopted.</p> <p>But I <em>can</em> tell you why people are <em>excited</em> 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 <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html" rel="noreferrer">Beating the Averages</a>. Oh, and his application? E-commerce web apps.</p> <p>Since early 2006 there has also been some buzz about functional programming and parallelism. Since people like <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/default.aspx" rel="noreferrer">Simon Peyton Jones</a> have been worrying about parallelism off and on since at least 1984, I'm not holding my breath until functional languages solve the multicore problem. But it does explain some of the additional buzz right about now.</p> <p>In general, American universities are doing a poor job teaching functional programming. There's a strong core of support for <a href="http://htdp.org/" rel="noreferrer">teaching intro programming using Scheme</a>, 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.</p>

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