A write-up of the Commercial Users of Functional Programming meeting held this October is available, for those of us who didn't attend. The write-up is well written and thought provoking (it was written by Jeremy Gibbons, so that's not a surprise).

The goal of the Commercial Users of Functional Programming series of workshops is to build a community for users of functional programming languages and technology. This, the fourth workshop in the series, drew 104 registered participants (and apparently more than a handful of casual observers).

It is often observed that functional programming is most widely used for language related projects (DSLs, static analysis tools and the like). Part of the reason is surely cultural. People working on projects of this type are more familiar with functional programming than people working in other domains. But it seems that it may be worthwhile to discuss the other reasons that make functional languages suitable for this type of work. There are plenty of reasons, many of them previously discussed here (e.g., Scheme's uniform syntax, hygiene, DSELs), but perhaps the issue is worth revisiting, seeing as this remains the killer application for functional programming, even taking into account the other types of project described in the workshop.