There are lot of important pieces of technology which are not prominent as they havent ridden the wave. The wave is an underswelling or hype factory that makes the piece of technology prominent, albeit it not being important. In the ages past we have had plenty of important technology that became prominent and a lot of unimportant technology that have become prominent. On the flip-side we have had important technologies that havent become prominent. Nuf, about all this gobblygook..

In the recent times there has been a wave pushing the metaphor of FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING with Ruby taking the center stage and bringing the likes of closures and functional expressions back, as well as the newest version of Javascript/ECMAScript that will have more functional soul in its being. Added to this wave, there is the fear of programming to multi-core chips. There has been a great deal of talk on how WE are not using the cores available in a chip, due to our imperative and sequential programs. This need was felt by the likes of Mr.Oreilly, who ended up inviting Simon Peyton-Jones of Haskell fame to give a keynote and several presentations on Haskell at the recently held OSCON. He also had a large Intel contingent pitching the multi-core mantra as well. Speaking historically, Lisp was the first functional programming paradigm that hit the industry. It fell out of prominence and importance.
For me FP has been on the radar for the last couple of years. I started taking it seriously this past year by starting the SICP online course at OpenCourseware. In addition I am doing some exercises in Erlang to start looking at parallelizing transactions.

In the end, LISP lives on in the soul of the Internet as the search engines powered today by Google uses the functional map and reduce algorithms that had it roots in FP. May be the lessons learned from an important, yet not prominent technology still adds prominence by morphing itself to ride the wave!

more here..

More interesting is to watch what Novell will do with the new found freedom..

As long as we let events like this to happen, it will be a long way before we can “stand on the shoulder of giants“. I really hope that the community rallies to get Ali back to his blackboards..

[personal prelude]

I was commenting on how cool it is to learn Math in an resorty setting with such rustic environment from the minds like Ali, to my 5 year old. He asked me where Turkey was and we proceeded to spend about an hour looking at the globe and atlas, looking at Turkey, the neighboring countries, physical landscape of Turkey and such. We dreamed about how cool it would be to visit Turkey. Later, when I told my son about this incident (that Ali was banned from teaching Math without permission) - he had a quizzical look on his face and stated that he doesnt want to go to a place where learning is a bad thing.

94year old Post Graduate!