Use in industry

Functional programming has a reputation for being of purely academic interest[citation needed]. However, several prominent functional programming languages have been used in commercial or industrial applications. For example, the Erlang programming language, which was developed by the Swedish company Ericsson in the late 1980s, was originally used to implement fault-tolerant telecommunications systems.[7] It has since become popular for building a range of applications at companies such as T-Mobile, Nortel, and Facebook.[6][8][40] The Scheme dialect of Lisp was used as the basis for several applications on early Apple Macintosh computers,[2][3] and has more recently been applied to problems such as training simulation software[4] and telescope control.[5] Objective Caml, which was introduced in the mid 1990s, has seen commercial use in areas such as financial analysis[9], driver verification, industrial robot programming, and static analysis of embedded software.[10] Haskell, although initially intended as a research language,[12] has also been applied by a range of companies, in areas such as aerospace systems, hardware design, and web programming.[11][12]

Other functional programming languages that have seen use in industry include Scala,[41] F#,[42][43] Lisp,[44] Standard ML,[45][46] and Clojure.