On Aug 11, 2010, at 7:30 PM, Ketil Malde wrote:
Sure, if the premise is that investment banks (or the military) are evil, then it is morally questionable to support them. If these are the major consumers of functional programming, one might question the ethics of working on FP in general as well.
But as I interpreted this thread, the premise was not about the morality of specific sectors, but rather that finance "takes away" too much of the FP talent.
One (but only one, and I do not say the major one) of the aspects of the "global financial crisis" is that bankers created a number of "advanced" financial instruments which nobody really knew how to value. "Advanced" computational models were developed for the purpose. People were warning about this 10 years ago or more; I bought a couple of books about it from a remainder shop. If functional programming gets associated in the profession's eyes with *that* kind of programming, it will not do FP any good. In any case, what with lambda expressions already in Apple's C (of all languages!), it's clear that FP ideas are becoming mainstream _without_ any need of help from the financial community. (Actually, that particular one is probably due to Objective C with its Smalltalk influence, so the "functional" origin here is ultimately Lisp.)