Erik Meijer is a language designer, and a big believer in functional programming in general and Haskell in particular. His essey Confessions of a Used Programming Language Salesman: Getting the Masses Hooked on Haskell is surprising and refreshing read. Not really a scientific paper, it appeared as an OOPSLA '07 Essey.
What is it really about? I think the following quote, from the Conclusions section, says it all: "Functional programming has finally reached the masses, except that it is called Visual Basic instead of Haskell."
We've all seen how functional programming concepts (like lambda functions and list comprehension) slowly appear in leading programming languages, often under different names. C#'s LINQ facility, for example, is list comprehension on steroids. Meijer explains that this tendency is no coincidence, and that in effect, some popular languages (led by Visual Basic 9, of all things!) are slowly but surely morphing into functional ones. They're a far cry from pure, lazy functional languages like Haskell, but these are baby steps in the right direction.
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