It sounds to me like you're the kind of person who has trouble recognizing OO code written in C.
Once you truly understand a programming paradigm you can express it in any Turing-complete language you want to. If you find yourself unable to do this, then you don't really understand that paradigm. And I assure you that the people at Google who implemented the map reduce framework understood functional programming very well.
Incidentally the fact that you disqualify SQL from the discussion because there is a paper standard seems to me to be silly. It is about as silly as saying that C isn't really a software language because there happens to be a written standard defining the language. The existence of the paper standard doesn't change the fact of a lot of software is being written with that piece of programming technology.
The fact that you compare SQL to C tells me that we clearly have a different understanding of programming languages, yes.
There are people that say "i code HTML". Yes, call it coding and programming if you like. I won't. Clearly SQL is powerful and great but you don't write software in it, which is my point of differentiation.
Yes yes, and there are probably a lot of programs writen in Ada and Fortran that have millions of lines of code and are reliable.
But, you can argue with me or not, it still is a niche.
C appeared in 1972.
Lisp (as one of the oldest i can think of) appeared in 1958.
Can we agree to say that there are far more programs written in C then in Lisp?
I don't argue which language is "the best" (because clearly, it's more subjective then objective to state on that).
But somehow, there is probably a reason, that C, as a newer language than Lisp, has by far more "followers" then Lisp.
If Lisp (as the grandfather of functional programming, but you can replace lisp with haskell, erlang or whatever you like) is so easy, creates better, more reliable code, etc. etc. Why did C take off and Lisp didn't?
In fact why do younger languages like Ruby have the bigger growth? Clearly people look for new languages, the people that nowadays learn ruby or c#. Why don't they learn Haskell?
For example:
Look at http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....
The really brand new language Go made it to #13. Lisp/Scheme after decades is #18. It's becoming more popular it seems, but i bet it won't be in the top10 for the next years.
Now, my simple and plain question is: Why is it like it is?
I actually don't want to argue what the best language is, there is no sense in that. And i can't code functional. See me as an observer from the outside. I'd like to learn erlang some time, for sure.
I agree. It's like saying that a Porsche is 'better' than a Ford, but you own a Ford because the Porsche costs more money than you make in a year.
I think functional language proponents want to compare languages using one set of metrics, even though they actually pick a language to write software in on an entirely different set of metrics. I mean they must either do that, or be entirely all talk, since very little software is being written in functional languages.
Once you truly understand a programming paradigm you can express it in any Turing-complete language you want to. If you find yourself unable to do this, then you don't really understand that paradigm. And I assure you that the people at Google who implemented the map reduce framework understood functional programming very well.
Incidentally the fact that you disqualify SQL from the discussion because there is a paper standard seems to me to be silly. It is about as silly as saying that C isn't really a software language because there happens to be a written standard defining the language. The existence of the paper standard doesn't change the fact of a lot of software is being written with that piece of programming technology.