So are there companies that pay people to write in Haskell, .. I do know of Galois Connections in Oregon; are there others?
Sure. If you look through the Haskell Community and Activities Reports (doesn't anyone read those anymore?-), you'll find some Haskell employees (apart from the obvious Microsoft and the secretive Galois, Xilinx, National Semiconductor, Aetion Technologies and Reid Consulting have been mentioned, Tom Pledger has been writing about a Haskell-like DSL for business data processing he is working on for his employer, the PDF group at Heriott-Watt lists some industrial collaborators, ..). We haven't seen reports about Sandburst/ BlueSpec, and there have been contributors with commercial affiliations who haven't admitted to any connections between their work and Haskell interests, so I'm sure there are more silent runners.. It would be nice to hear from others using Haskell on their jobs, even if there's no official company policy about it and no prospect of new Haskell-related jobs at their place (only Galois and Cesarini Consulting are listed in the Haskell "positions in industry" category at haskell.org - perhaps there should be a more general "current Haskell employers" category instead?-).
or indeed in any functional language?
Now, that is an entirely different situation: if one includes Lisp, Scheme, Erlang, etc. (not to mention in-house languages) then commercial fp applications are so long-established that functional programmers are hired and fired like anyone else. The weekly job summaries on comp.compilers used to be helpful.. A completely different question is whether anyone is hiring right now.. Good Luck! Claus http://www.haskell.org/communities http://www.haskell.org/jobs.html