jedws

> Whenever somebody quotes growth numbers instead of absolute numbers, they are trying to hide something.

No, it is the data you asked us to look at and it refutes your claim that "they are as insignificant today as they were five years ago". They are _less_ insignificant. They may still be several orders of magnitude lower, but your claim is still incorrect.

The datas do not match your assertions: http://www.indeed.com/jobanalytics/jobtrends?q=scala&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=clojure&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=haskell&l=

> foreach is insanely slow

no, in 2.9 using a 1 to 10 generator and a foreach was slower than using one using primitives due to the boxing. This is fixed in trunk.

> gets up in arms at the idea of a 'for' statement in the language

Scala's for is an expression, you can use it as a statement by not yielding anything if you want. Scala's for is extraordinarily versatile, basically allowing you to work within any monadic context (where a monadic context is some container that implements map/flatMap and some other optional methods.

These "I can't believe its not Haskell" people tend to want to stay with the realm of FP, which is a very useful place to be. Minimising and tracking side-effects and having more expressive and useful types makes more composable software. This is not at all academic, it is an entirely practical result. It does however require you to rethink your approach to writing code, and it really helps to learn a few seemingly difficult things like the typeclassopedia (Monads, Monoids, Functors, Applicatives etc).

Personally I find that the Scala community is generally consolidating around functional approaches, and that this is a very good thing. It is a step beyond a "better Java" and is perhaps more initially intimidating, but it is definitely worth the effort.

The presentation is worth reading. Scala is an awesome language whose main disadvantage is that it is a language for smart people.

http://www.paulgraham.com/vanlfsp.html

Being in Aus we don't get to see many live and rely on the videos being made available. Of those I particularly liked Daniel Spiewak's "Extreme Cleverness: Functional Data Structures" and Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy".

We were fortunate enough though to have the excellent YOW conference with many excellent talks, particular stand-outs coming from Simon Peyton-Jones and Mike Lee, but the absolute best talk (not necessarily the best tech, it is Perl after all) was Damian Conway's flabbergasting "Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces...Made Easy!"[1]

[1] http://www.yowconference.com.au/YOW2011/general/workshopDeta...