Hey, you know how the programming languages course at SIUE teaches you Scheme (or did, anyway, when I was there)? Well, I finally found a direct use for it rather than just conceptual use through things like erlang or lisp: gEDA (http://www.gpleda.org/index.html). The config files are written in it; maybe the whole system is.
Anyway, thought I'd throw that nerd bit out there.
I'm not sure if they still do, the course is being rewritten.
On another functional language note, Guy Steele (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele,_Jr.) made the suggestion that every programmer should learn Clojure the other day when discussing the future of programming languages. Josh Blosch (Chief Java Architect at Google) suggested Scheme I believe.
Yeah, I've heard about CLojure and have considered it. I haven't really looked into it yet so am not sure yet. Does it enforce type immutability or enforce it as an option? If it does, I can see it leading to highly outward scalable applications, like erlang does.
However, with Oracle's behavior surrounding Java, I'm not so sure about it being a safe platform. Maybe LLVM or GCC with the next spec of C++ having lambda would be just as good. Again, I haven't looked into either thing yet.
Quite honestly, I know nothing about clojure other than it is a lisp dialect that works with the JVM. I plan on picking up "7 languages in 7 weeks" whenever it finally hits the bookstores, so I figure I can learn about it a bit more then.
Ya, I picked up to Pragmatic Bookshelf Clojure book, but haven't really had a chance to look into it yet. I know its become pretty popular for concurrent number crunching; flightcaster uses it for their algorithms.