Jon Harrop wrote:
When functional languages achieve these goals I believe the total number of users will increase dramatically as scientists and engineers adopt them alongside their standard tools. Bioinformaticians are among the first to adopt functional programming languages but I believe more mainstream natural sciences will follow.
FWIW, a few years ago, when I was stubbornly unemployed[*], I wrangled a fifteen-minute informational interview with Kenan Sahin[**]. He advised me to look for work related to medical devices, on the grounds that as the US population got older there would be greater and greater demand for medical equipment, and software is becoming a more and more important component of these devices. [*] I had been working for Whitehead on the Human Genome Project, thinking that an academic job would be the perfect place to ride out the dot-com crash. Then they finished sequencing the human genome and didn't need so many programmers. So much for academic job security. [**] Sahin had founded of a company that I had worked for, which he had sold to Lucent for 1.5 gigabucks shortly *before* the dot-com crash.