I knew it was coming. The popularity of functional programming languages are on the rise now that processors are expanding horizontally(SMP) rather than vertically(clock speed). It’s also rather difficult to scale anything written with training wheels.
My initial bet was on Erlang, but with its unnatural syntax and different thought process, it’s not catching on among young kids just graduating from extremely high level languages. It’s really hard to think anything other than objects these days, and that is the root cause of Erlang and Haskell’s lack of popularity. I remember when OOP was a new concept. Now, everything is object. Interesting…
Well, after brief review of Scala, it’s pretty clear which functional programming language will win. Scala runs on top of Java VM, yes, Java. You can find out why I came up with this conclusion by reading Programming in Scala by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon, and Bill Venners.