While this comes up every single time somebody talks about functional programming making inroads, I still consider it a fairly unhelpful indicator. First, nobody's arguing that big companies are suddenly doing the bulk of their development in these languages. It's about using them at all. Second, job postings may be lagging and distorted in their own way (e.g., junior positions are much more likely to be publicly advertised, and so on).

The less said about TIOBE, the better.

Anecdotally (n=1, of course) I have seen and heard tremendous resistance to clisp in the industry I work in 5 years ago. Now, clojure and Scala are being adopted and recommended by even conservative PMs and architects.

The choices are way more today (Almost a tautology given old choices don't really vanish into thin air) and on more reliable platforms with tried and tested libraries.

anyway the spirit with which i meant that statement was that it is far easier to convince "senior management" and others with power to let stuff be done in clojure / Scala than it was to convince them about ml or clisp five years ago.

And I am not even talking about "ivory tower Haskell" (which i love using).

(Don't know enough about erlang / f# to comment).

My new recent project is in .NET and I happily using all functional like features C# 4.0 offers.

I think when people talk about functional programming being used more in industry, they don't imagine it replacing Java or Python as the lowest common denominator language everybody uses. Rather, they imagine either small companies or small teams within larger companies using functional programming to be more productive.

So the sheer number of people using functional programming may not be very high even if functional programming is making inroads into industry. Now, I don't know whether functional programming actually is making inroads into industry or not, but my impression is that anybody relatively good at it could find a very nice functional programming job fairly easily.

Not to mention that they are also referring to functional programming being used within those existing languages. Even Visual Basic contains a pretty capable functional subsystem these days, with lambdas, higher order functions and so on (albeit lacking concepts like immutability and referential transparency).

Job boards have one weakness: They reflect supply and demand. There is not much demand for Scala programmers. This may be because all positions are filled. Or, a more probable cause, that Scala programmers are not hired on Job boards.

Note that I have had 5-6 Jobs. I do FP for a living. And I have never been hired through a Job board advert. I think this is common with many FP people. Usually, when you want to hire FP people, you go to the mailing lists and community and get the guys you need. It is much more effective, but it won't show up in the Job board search at all.

The datas do not match your assertions: http://www.indeed.com/jobanalytics/jobtrends?q=scala&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=clojure&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=haskell&l=

Yes, it does.

Your data is showing that Scala grew from 0.01% to 0.03% over the past two years. Sounds impressive, right?

It's a relative number. Whenever somebody quotes growth numbers instead of absolute numbers, they are trying to hide something.

Let's take a look at the absolute numbers:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=scala%2C+java&l=

As you can see, Scala's line is a flatline around 0 compared to Java.

> Whenever somebody quotes growth numbers instead of absolute numbers, they are trying to hide something.

No, it is the data you asked us to look at and it refutes your claim that "they are as insignificant today as they were five years ago". They are _less_ insignificant. They may still be several orders of magnitude lower, but your claim is still incorrect.

If you are saying that 0.01% is insignificant but 0.03% is not, then you might have gone off a little bit too far on the fan boy scale.

Just take absolute numbers: According to indeed, there are over 1000 open jobs mentioning Scala in the US, and over 750 in the UK. Taken together, the number of open Scala jobs in both countries exceeds the number of open Groovy jobs. It's still small compared to Java jobs (to be precise 1.5% in the US, close to 3% in the UK), but Java is by far the most demanded language, so this is not surprising. To say there is no pick-up in adoption of functional languages is disingenuous, IMO.

And most of those job ads mentioning "Groovy" are for using groovy as an add-on to Java, while those mentioning "Scala" are usually for using Scala as the primary language.

> To say there is no pick-up in adoption of functional languages is disingenuous, IMO.

The question is not about pick up (there is some, 0.01% to 0.03%, according to indeed.com) but whether that pick up is significant.

And, I should add, given this level of demand it's a good thing we just finished the Scala massive open online class with more than 10'000 developers completing the course with success.

A programmer who can't admit that his claim, expressed as an inequality, evaluates to false?