Actually from a business perspective PHP or something would be the best choice? Lots of (relatively speaking) cheap devs available at all levels. Wasn't Java designed around the idea of medicore developers not being able to mess up too badly?

Functional languages do appear to attract smart people, but I see far more people with an interest in the language than actual jobs out there. They seem more geared towards compute science (more theoretical) over software engineering (solving real world problems).