Actually knowledge of of any those is a proxy for the general quality of those developers. They could end up writing C++ but the fact that they went out and sought to learn language they thought was beautiful or had a different paradigm tells something about them.
I get that it is possible to generalize public opinions and say that something is "objectively" beautiful, or ugly. But I don't get why people familiar with those three languages always praise their functional purity, as if imperative languages are barbaric. How come there aren't ugly functional languages?
I'll talk about Erlang for example. Functional purity is objectively beautiful because it solves or minimizes a large number of typical problems. These problems such as large mutable states, large mutable state modifications during high levels of concurrency. A good functional language, using closures can mimic other patterns while having a very small core set of rules.
Purity doesn't mean moral superiority (although it sounds like) purity means referential purity for example, where the function when called no matter how many times with the same argument returns the same result. That is beautiful because it allows for interesting compiler optimizations, good for testing. Other looser explanations of purity are -- confinement of mutable state (this could mean monads in Haskell modifications to shared global state), immutable data structures in Erlang or Clojure.
Now that said these are all tools. As I mentioned, in practice, a lot of these people in their day job will end up using Java or C++. But the fact that they decided and managed to learn a new paradigm is what is the key.
Heck it could have been data-flow programming or logic programming (Prolog is awesome too, especially when mixed with constraint satisfaction).
Yet another way of putting it, familiarity with these things point to a level of passion and sets someone apart, that is quite desirable. Now, yes, there is a self-referential quality to it all, the more we think functional programming is a proxy for developer quality, the more people will do tutorials just to put it on their resume. Well, then the next fashion will be something else -- quantum algorithms perhaps, who knows.
I am sure those high caliber gurus will have no problem learning javascript overnight. That wll be excellent addition to their toolbx for that rare case when their internet enabled fridge gets hijacked
On the other hand, a quick straw-poll through my contact list - out of all my friends/colleagues who I'd guess have used (or even heard of) those languages, I don't think a single one of them has been "on the job market" in the last 4 or 5 years (they're all either comfortably long-term employed at their present gig, or they've been successfully running or partnering small consulting firms of their own).
That is where good headhunters come in. I don't have a linked in account, Facebook or google+, and am quite happy at my current job, yet get calls from google or other companies periodically. Still don't know how they find me out, I do go to conferences so maybe they buy lists of attendees...?
1) I'm guessing (by reading between the lines) that you also haven't "been on the job market", and haven't been plausibly tempted to "jump ship" to any language-purist position?
2) <cynical mode> Just because you haven't set up LinkedIn/FaceBook/Google+ profiles yourself, that doesn't mean they don't all have "shadow profiles" for you based of the social-graphs they've got where your colleagues/friends have "leaked" information about your existence to them and enabled them to infer skills/abilities from them… I don't _know_ that they sell data from "shadow profiles" to recruiters, but I do suspect there's enough money in tech recruitment to make it likely…
As funny as it might sound, you should try Node then.
Single threaded. Concurrency via processes, impossible to share state. And, among the more efficient dynamic languages out there now due to the browser performance race.
There's a slippery word if ever I saw one. Does Java count? Python? C? You could make arguments for all, or none, of these depending on what "proper" is.
I said "properly" to avoid confusion, but it probably only increased it. Java is not a strictly compiled language, since it still uses JVM. Most modern dynamic languages aren't purely interpretive and they use various techniques (like JIT) which make them closer to compiled, but they are still not "properly" compiled in a sense. That's what I meant above.
There is already a strong effort in Ruby land - check out http://artoo.io/. Artoo was developed with robotics in mind but it is not limited to that domain.
You could - but V8 is actually much faster than Ruby or Python, and JS syntax is quite good for I/O. Better than that, a ton of people know JS and the more developers find this accessible, the better.
Once upon a time Javascript was this fragmented language, mostly associated with blinking effects, pop-ups and lame attempts to protect a web page from being viewed as pure HTML. After years of misery the community was tired of how things was and said, "No more"! And so html-tables and javascript was sent to a zip-drive (you probably won't remember those, think of it like a SD-card) to never be seen on the web again.
But evil people who sold out to the dark forces was destined to bring javascript back. By making frameworks they masked the incompatibilities of the language, making it seem like a friend. And the young people who never fought the war, they welcomed this new technology with open arms.
But seriously, we took a typesetting language made for writing documents (just like word) and turn it into a technology for making software. It turned out into a total mess, and now you wonder why taking a language made for manipulating the DOM and using it for manipulating the stack is a bad idea? "When all you have is a hammer..."?
Twenty years ago I read exactly the same about using the abomination that was perl/CGI instead of the so called correct C. And history tells us that the prototypes that were made to test the concept where, most of the times, good enough to stop further development in the academic way. This product (or a similar one) can empower lots of people in ways that we cannot imagine yet.
Not all hardware has to be made by hundreds of thousands and be able to tinker with real world devices will be a bigger asset than we think right now. The web we know now hasn't been developed from tall towers but from the trenches. New ideas will flourish and then great developers will be needed to optimize, refine and scale projects that will change our view. At least that's what I hope.
You didn't address any of my points. Perl may have been horrible, line noise or a read only language, but 20 years ago was the quickest way to write a visitor book or a mailform. You could do it in C but didn't, just because you didn't need to. If the perl prototype was good enough, you could use it in production, and thousands of sites started to build whole e-commerce systems and found they worked.
Thad was a tipping point for the web, and the world now is different just because of that.
If you have to choose between power and easiness of development, most people will choose the later, and if I can try a new hardware board that doesn't force me to learn anything new, I'd probably try it.
