Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 11:22:40AM +0900, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
>> 2. A year or so ago there was an ACM conference on functional languages 
>> here in Portland. I didn't go to the conference itself, but I did attend 
>> a Saturday Erlang workshop and a Sunday Scheme workshop. At the Erlang 
>> workshop, the small (30 or so) room at Portland State University was 
>> packed to overflowing -- at least 60 jammed into it -- and at least a 
>> dozen of them were from a couple of teams at Amazon, who were hiring.
> 
> Missed opportunities . . .
> 
> Actually, I like my non-corporate work lifestyle.  If I was looking for a
> corporate coder job, though, that'd be the sort of thing that might be
> high on my list -- getting picked up by a team attending an Erlang
> workshop.  I'd be even more impressed if that happened at the Scheme
> workshop.
> 
Well ... I must say I enjoyed the Scheme workshop, but, yes, Scheme is 
probably always going to be a lab rat rather than a workhorse. :) There 
were one or two papers from people with "industrial-strength" 
applications written in Scheme, though.

I'm so happy I get paid to program in R -- it's really one of the better 
languages out there, although if you don't do number crunching or 
statistics, there isn't much motivation to learn it. It's a nice 
functional language, lexically scoped, and is well suited to processing 
arrays of data with small amounts of code. It's what Lisp should have 
been. Or rather, S is what Lisp should have been and R is a lexically 
scoped dialect of S. :)