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OCaml For the Masses
CowboyRobot writes "Yaron Minsky of Jane Street argues that the time has come for statically-typed functional languages like OCaml and Haskell. He cites many reasons and illustrates what he says is the most important, concision: 'The importance of concision is clear: other things being equal, shorter code is easier to read, easier to write, and easier to maintain.'"
This is why I think Scala will succeed.
Scala has all the advantages that the article mentions AND you can integrate and reuse your old Java or .NET code and libraries.
It's there. The tooling doesn't suck half bad anymore. The world just needs to find out.
I personally think that Scala will win over the 10% best Java programmers as soon as the tooling is comparable to Javas.
And that might happen within the next 1-2 years.
My favorite code to read is OOP stuff written by coders who understand and make use of functional programming concepts. They know how to write things that are stateless when that makes sense, and use state in an appropriate manner when that makes sense.
And yes, by all means use it when appropriate. But don't think that Lisp is always the right language for scripting your text editor (dodges blow from Emacs partisan).
I am officially gone from