This is one of my biggest beefs with MIT's new undergraduate curriculum: in the panic over the post dot.com crash in enrollment (from 400 students per class for decades to a bit less than 200) among other things orders came down from on high to purge Scheme from it. So now it's Python and Java, and as you might know Mr. Python hates functional programing.

(My biggest beef is personal, in that I'm by nature a scientist and what was most interesting in the department has been officially purged, although a cut down version of 6.001 (SICP) is still being taught in January, and you can even earn credit if you're one of the first N to sign up (purely a resource constraint there).)

(Also BTW, enrollment has climbed back up, 305 sophomores are declared EECS majors this fall term.)

Problem is, the multi-core future is very much here today and as far as I know functional programming remains the best practical way to address SMP/cNUMA systems (well, you can always go to actors but then you end up copying a lot of data if you're not functional and in general they haven't caught on like their proponents had hoped, except that of course that style is used for less tightly coupled multi-processor systems like today's big supercomputers).

He wrote an article about a year later which addressed almost exactly that point: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html