Functional programming has finally reached the masses by VB

Confessions of a Used Programming Language Salesman - Getting the Masses Hooked on Haskell

The author summaries that functional programming has finally reached the masses, except that it is called Visual Basic instead of Lisp, ML, or Haskell.

The study is serious, covering many cutting-edge fields, yet the conclusion seems a bit exaggerating.

Update:
It wouldn't be surprising that we will see more and more functional stufffs like LINQ in VB or other popular Microsoft products considering the fact that Microsoft Research has hired some of top functional-programming researchers such as Simon Marlow, Simon Peter Jones (both are Haskell/GHC leaders) and Don Syme (F# creator, major contributor of C# generics design).

I bet sooner or later we will see STM (software transactional memory) "entering mainstream" to address the issue of concurrency  lock.