Functional languages in the real world

Once in the mid 1990's I was interviewing with a Fortune 500 company. "What's with all this functional programming experience?" I was asked. "What's the point? Are they really going anywhere?" Especially for this real-time embedded system company, functional programming sounded like a waste of time.

A lot of us who enjoy functional programming have wondered if it will catch on. My answer to that interviewer was that Java was catching on, and it featured garbage collection and allowed anonymous classes which can be used to imitate first-class functions. A little weak perhaps, but it did seem to make a point with him.

Then XSL/XSLT came along, and I was really happy, because here was something where you were supposed to think functionally, where you thought more about transformations and mappings than storage elements and order of evaluation.

And then recently, I finally stumbled across a truth which was out there but unknown to me: Javascript is functional. At least, it offers first-class functions, garbage collection, and lets you program in a functional style. The featured link shows how the author implemented a Lisp to Javascript translator in just a few hundred lines of Javascript, made easy in part because Javascript has anonymous functions to start with.

Then today I ran across this presentation, which shows how to do both functional and aspect-oriented programming in Javascript. The authors are behind Dojo, an open source Javascript toolkit for doing things like AJAX, eventing, and animations. I haven't examined the source for Dojo, but I presume that given the presentation, the Dojo system actually used the functional programming capabilities of Javascript.

The amazing thing is that Javascript had me fooled: in the words of one of Cryptopunk's commenters, "I thought JavaScript was just super-dumb Java". Lots of programmers and web developers use Javascript this way, tweaking HTML DOM elements, declaring variables without types, and generally writing like it was BASIC for the web. Now we find that the C-style syntax and Java-like supporting libraries were hiding our friend, the lambda.

Even neater, this blindness can go both ways. Developers who appreciate functional programming can take advantage of Javascript's functional features, perhaps incorporating Dojo to achieve some really high-quality web interfaces quickly and with some code they can possibly reuse at the end of the day. And nobody is going to ask them "what's the point". All the developer's manager probably knows is that the implementation language is Javascript, and who doesn't use that?

So have we arrived in a world where functional languages have a real-world need to justify their development and support? I think we're getting there. If you couldn't already get a job writing in OCaml for a New York securities firm or with a European firm coding in ERlang, you can almost certainly get a web monkey position hacking web pages in a functional style with the help of Dojo, and no one will know the difference.