They are assuming that functional programming is on the rise. With the exception of Clojure (which is more popular by virtue of being new), I don't know of an

They are assuming that functional programming is on the rise. With the exception of Clojure (which is more popular by virtue of being new), I don't know of any functional language that are in any measurable way more popular (I assume that is what they mean by on the rise) than it has been in the last 10 years. In fact, the only application I use that is built using functional programming is Xmonad. Also, none of the top languages on the TIOBE survey are purely functional, although one in the top 20, 'lisp' with .9% and falling, does promote a functional style. People expound the virtues of functional programming year after year, and then go off and get a bunch done with Python. Steve Yegge said it best: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-announce-discovery.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-... http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....