Oh definitely, while I don’t think it will ever evolve into everyone using Haskell, we’re definitely going to keep seeing more and more functional concepts creep into all programming languages. Hell, even king OOP, Java, is even breaking down and adding some functional things last I heard, finally getting lambdas (I think), right? And I imagine that was much to the outcry of thousands of “enterprise” developers, what’s going to happen when big bad functional programming comes to down and shuts down all their abstract factories?! Think of their child classes!
But, I digress, and honestly think a nice balance between concepts, and using what works best for the task at hand. However, I’m super excited for the future of functional languages. I love Elixir/Erlang, once you get the hang of OTP/actor model/functional programming, it’s absolutely mind blowing how easy it is to write highly concurrent programs that are super reliable, easy to restart from failures (just let it die is what they say right?). Nothing like the headache’s I experienced when I first learned concurrency with pthreads in c++. And what’s exciting is the Erlang VM is legendary for being able to build up highly reliable and super concurrent, complex software, however one of it’s biggest dings was it’s far slower than something like C when it comes to raw computations. This is largely because of it’s functional nature, since it’s data structures are immutable, any modifications will result in having to make new copies of data, while C could just do it right in place. However, now that raw computing power is becoming cheaper and faster, they is becoming much less of an issue. And the Erlang VM can handle things like clustering servers to run processes across several computers built right in. I don’t want to imagine what it’d be like to have to set that up with our old friend C out of the box (but C also doesn’t have the overhead of things like a VM or a garbage collector, so it’s not like it doesn’t have a ton of advantages over Erlang I just wouldn’t want to use it to build concurrent software across multiple servers).
