Rise And Fall Of Computer Languages In 2012 by Andrew Binstock.
From the post:
The most recent processor phenomenon — the transition from the multicore to many-core era — was expected to set the stage for the emergence of functional languages, which fit well with concurrent programming. But most surveys from 2012 still show no major breakthrough. If a functional language does separate from the pack, the leading candidates are Scala and Clojure, with Scala enjoying the greater adoption right now. This per Ohloh’s language figures, which cover all open source projects, and Google trends, which indicate search traffic. On the venerable Tiobe index, which tracks the number of Web pages that mention a given language, Haskell, Erlang, and Scala are effectively tied and ahead of Clojure.
The full story appears at Dr. Dobbs.
Other reasons to prefer functional languages/approaches:
- Creation of auditable merging.
- Re-use of subject representatives (not everyone has the same merging criteria).