I cannot resist to answer to your message:

> The purpose of my original message:
> 
> "When functional languages can be accepted by industry?"

[...]
> It is no doubt that functional languages will continue to succeed in
> eduacation, research, high level specification, formal program verification,
> fast prototyping, etc. But, it appears to me that, in industry, the
> second approach might succeed in most cases.

by a mere copy of another message I received just at the same time, from
Chris Tilt:

-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Chris Tilt <cet@webcriteria.com> 
To: Pierre Weis <Pierre.Weis@inria.fr> 
Subject: Industrial use of Caml 

Dear sir,

[...]

I would just like to let you and your team know that we use
the CAML dialect (v2.4) in the development of some of our
production software here at WebCriteria. We are an Internet
startup of about 30 people (6 programmers) and provide a
service for the automatic reviewing of the User Experience
on Websites. 

We use CAML to program the core modeling and analysis module
within our data center. CAML has proven to be a very effective
and efficient programming language for the construction of
this part of the product. We have constructed a Model Human 
Browser based on the GOMS modeling system in combination with
graph theoretic analysis.

My use of CAML was inspired by Andrew Tolmach, a professor at
PSU and OGI in Portland, Oregon, USA.

Please express my deepest appreciation to your team for the  
development of a language that can support an industrial
application. We benefitted from it's ability to quickly and
concisely express a solution to a difficult problem. Although
we base most of our command and control software in Java, ML
is still the choice for modeling and graph theory. 

Best regards, Chris

[...]
--
Chris Tilt                      mailto:cet@webcriteria.com
CTO, WebCriteria, Inc.          http://www.webcriteria.com
-------------------------------------------------------------

I also express my personal ``deepest appreciation to the Caml team''
for our great language that can support hairy academic programming as
well as industrial developments.

Best regards,

-- 
Pierre Weis

INRIA, Projet Cristal, http://pauillac.inria.fr/~weis