Lambda the Ultimate

I'm part of a group that is writing a paper trying to explain, to other computer scientists and engineers, the importance to universities of teaching undergraduate courses on programming languages. (The group is a subcommittee of the (newly formed) ACM SIGPLAN education board.) The hope is that this paper will be useful in influencing the IEEE/ACM curriculum revisions and ABET accreditation process. It might also help motivate students in such a course.

So, we are seeking a set of examples (or data) that say how the kind of knowledge taught in (esp. undergraduate) courses on programming languages help students in their careers. These careers could be in industry or research, but probably the most interesting and least debatable examples would come from industry. What we'd like are examples that would be convincing to computer scientists and engineers who are outside the field of programming languages, since those are the ones we have to sell on the importance of courses in programming languages.

An example of such an example is Paul Graham's paper "Beating the Averages" (see http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html). Other examples we know something about, but would like more details about, are LexiFi's use of abstraction ideas in financial contracts ("Composing Contracts: An Adventure in Financial Engineering", by Simon Peyton Jones, Jean-Marc Eber, and Jullian Seward, in IFIP 2000), Ericsson's use of Erlang (http://erlang.org/doc.html), Twitter's use of Scala ( http://www.artima.com/scalazine/articles/twitter_on_scala.html), software transactional memory and Haskell ( http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Software_transactional_memory).

If you know of more examples, please let us know by replying to this thread, preferably with a reference or link. Since the functional programming community has done an especially good job of making clear what their commercial successes are (see http://cufp.galois.com/), we are particularly interested in ideas from the programming language community that are not just "apply functional programming ideas" (although those are welcome too), for example older stories of how using OO gave a market advantage, or how some company used logic programming to configure computers. The best kind of examples would relate directly to topics typical of undergraduate programming languages courses (e.g., "How I made a million dollars by using static scoping" :-).