During my four years at university we have been using much functional programming in several functional programming languages. But I have also used much object oriented programming to, and in fact I use object oriented languages more when doing my own small project to prepare for my first job. But I often wish that I was coding in a functional programming language when doing these projects.

However, when looking for a job, it is very rare to see a job where knowledge of a functional programming language is required.

Why isn't functional programming languages used more in the industry? There is quite much news about functional programming languages these days, so I wonder if functional programming is catching on in the industry now?

I was a professor and, just like programmers, professors are always looking for the Next Big Thing. When they think they've found one, they make it a bandwagon, and everyone piles on. Since they are preaching to students who think professors must be really smart, else why would they be professors, they get no resistance.

Functional programming is such a bandwagon. Sure it's got lots of nice interesting questions to investigate, and lots of sort-of-interesting conference articles to write. It's not a particularly new idea, and you can do it in just about any modern language, and ideas don't have to be new to be interesting. It's also a good skill to have.

Given that, functional programming is just one arrow to have in your quiver, not the only one, just as OOP is not the only one.

My beef with computer science academia is lack of practical interplay with industry to determine what actually makes real-world sense, i.e. quality control. If that quality control were there, there might be a different emphasis, on classifying problems and the ranges of solutions to them, with tradeoffs, rather than just the latest bandwagons.
