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I don't think that holds water. We've had functional programming for longer than oracle or java have existed, and for far longer than oracle has owned java. Haskell itself has been around for longer than java or oracle-owned java.

Functional programming just seems harder for people to get into. Perhaps it's bad for everyone that people don't make that effort, but it doesn't seem like a conspiracy

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My mistake, at the time, Java was being promoted by Sun Microsystems, which only more recently became a part of Oracle.

The promotional campaign that Dijkstra mentions was perhaps orchestrated by Sun Microsystems, though perhaps not since Oracle was indirectly strategically aligned with Java, as the eventual acquisition shows.

Yes, it is more difficult to get into FP. However, asking the question why it became more difficult, when historically the opposite was true, is certainly worthwhile. Surely there was some cause.

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