Having any "most in-demand functional programming language" seems to be a bit silly. In the larger view, there simply isn't any demand.
I REALLY want this to change. I think if Clojure can make some inroads to the enterprise, there will be trickle-down effect that will help increase opportunities to work in Clojure. I think increasing working opportunities is what language evangelism is for.
As a hacker who loves the repl, functional programming, weird languages, and was at the first Clojure/conj, it is not clear to me at all that immutability and pure functions are wins in general - lots of excellent working systems are out there that don't bother using this stuff at all (no silver bullet is kind of what I am driving at). I might instead argue that in the hands of good-to-great hackers, that immutability and pure functions offer some benefits that are hard to quantify when you normalize across raw hacker abilities.
PS - Thanks so much for the book. A large part of Clojure's success is directly attributable to the high quality and number of books that have popped up so soon in its life as a programming language.
The Java market is massive. Nearly everything else is essentially background noise compared to it. I'm skeptical that any single language will ever have the same reach as it.
Runtimes, on the other hand, are a different story. The JVM, standardized JavaScript engines, even the CLR/Mono to some extent: polyglot sandboxes where you have the leverage to use whatever language will get the job done. That's a huge win for, as you put it, good-to-great hackers, trying to find the edge of what's next.
'course, that's a wash to a loss (i.e. increased risk) for those with the enterprise mindset. Thus, Java 8 with its closures may very well consolidate its position in such environments.
I had not thought deeply about runtimes in relation to this question. It's certainly true that one reason I can hack around in Clojure and count on that code running on our production servers is that the JVM is ubiquitous there. Quite a different story than when I was doing some stuff in SBCL and had to compile it in my user space.
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=java%2Cclojure%2Chaskell%2...
Having any "most in-demand functional programming language" seems to be a bit silly. In the larger view, there simply isn't any demand.
I REALLY want this to change. I think if Clojure can make some inroads to the enterprise, there will be trickle-down effect that will help increase opportunities to work in Clojure. I think increasing working opportunities is what language evangelism is for.
As a hacker who loves the repl, functional programming, weird languages, and was at the first Clojure/conj, it is not clear to me at all that immutability and pure functions are wins in general - lots of excellent working systems are out there that don't bother using this stuff at all (no silver bullet is kind of what I am driving at). I might instead argue that in the hands of good-to-great hackers, that immutability and pure functions offer some benefits that are hard to quantify when you normalize across raw hacker abilities.
PS - Thanks so much for the book. A large part of Clojure's success is directly attributable to the high quality and number of books that have popped up so soon in its life as a programming language.