I started learning functional programming over Christmas 2008 for two reasons:
- Mainly because it looked fun, and very different from what I'd done before
- Although I had no idea whether F# or Haskell jobs would come up, I knew that if they did come up, they'd be just right for me
I'd like to be more involved in the functional programming community; it's easy to dip in and out of Twitter and forum discussions, but blogging is one thing that's dropped off since the summer.
Me: "I'm really interested in functional programming and scaling distributed computing."
HR: "Well, I see here you've worked on Java in the payment industry. We're always looking for more people to work on our reporting team. Let's put you over there. I think they have a J2EE web-app from eight years ago that needs a few more features."
So I find myself settling and maintaining my sanity with pet projects.
I am taking steps to rectify this.
One possible explanation for the number of job postings for Actionscript is that the culture around doing Flash animations is one where there is high turnover. Thus there are lots of open jobs at any one time.
Another possible explanation is that there is a culture of paying people very little for full time jobs but overpaying agencies (who also pay little). As a result, companies are constantly hoping to hire someone at a bargain but rarely finding anyone willing to work long hours for low wages, and they are forced to go to agencies for their needs.
I don't know if either explanation is true, of course, but I do know that I'd look into a lot more than a single cherry-picked statistic before deciding I wanted to learn a new programming language.