progamming language book sales

interesting analysis of book sales by programming language. in a nutshell scripting languages are spiking up in popularity. given that most of the scripting languages encourages functional style (list comprehensions, map, apply) of programming this bodes well for encouraging people to look at more robust (type enforcement), functional languages (F#, boo, nemerle, scala, ocaml, haskell). gut feeling is that functional and domain specific languages are gaining momentum. may be eventually DSL's will replace the multitude of framework API's. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/state_of_the_co_10.html

new york functional programmers meeting

met a bunch of very good people. great to see that functional languages are used in real projects at leading financial services institutions. haskell and ocaml appears to be very popular. people seem to like the idea and implementation of F#, but a quite concerned about licensing issues. The main fear is that microsoft will stop development related to F# and won't release the implementation to public domain, so the language will be stillborn. i think such worries are a little premature. Microsoft also has a fairly decent record with regard to using public domain for it's CLR and C# specification (enabling success of projects like mono). Given enough interest and requests to F# team, surely it will be in everyone's interest to make the language implementation available for the public.