Nope. I'm not an IT guy, I'm a developer :)

Got my MBA from WGU (and my employer even paid for it). Loved that it was entirely self-paced and was able to finish a semester early :) If WGU ever offers something equivalent to a MSCS I might pursue another degree there on my own dime (it's a non-profit school and cheap).

Pick up a copy of Learn You a Haskell

You could easily spend a year banging your head against the wall with functors, monads, etc.

I remember working on a large Ada project several years ago, which involved porting an old system from Solaris/SPARC to RHEL/x86, and adding a slew of new features. The dev environment was absolutely horrible: Each engineer had a windows desktop (corporate policy, you know) and had to use exceed to connect to a Linux dev box to do our actual work (and of course, one monitor per workstation).

As a scumbag sub-contractor, I was not allowed to look at/have access to certain parts of the codebase -- which meant there was no way for me to do a complete build and actually test my module -- all I could do was run my code through the Ada compiler and let it do its error checking. The schedule was overly-optimistic of course, with all testing pushed to the very end of the project (waterfall).

I coded slowly, and carefully -- pausing often to run the code in my head. I was being constantly harrangued for being behind on my SLOC (occasionally even going backwards, a grave sin). Finally, 3/4 of the way through the project, a code repository was set up. I submitted my code to the one blessed person who had permission to commit to svn on my behalf, and weekly builds were provided for testing purposes.

My stuff largely just worked (and suddenly I was no longer a slacker in the eyes of others). I left that job with a new respect for Ada, though I never used it again. I program in Java (blech) these days, becuase I like being employable.

Well, I haven't evaluated the alternatives yet, man.

Foisting your politics on your customers, eh? Stripe was one of my favorite services - to the point I never even thought about using any other payment processor. I see that may need to change...

I'm quite satisfied with the current crop of functional languages, what I'm waiting for is widespread adoption so I can stop working with Java to pay the rent. What do I like about it? The expressiveness of FP and immutability-by-default (makes concurrent programming much less headache inducing), are two major benefits, I suppose.

Well, you're probably right... but I think that says more about your average programmer than about the utility of lambda expressions. The biggest complaint I hear about Scala (or any other FP language) is that it's too hard to learn. I've even had a coworker tell me that since Java does "everything", there is no need to learn any other language (I didn't know how to respond to that).

I'm still waiting for that FP renaissance....

Programmers that really cared about things like lambda expressions have already moved on to Scala and/or Clojure (and of course, it's not as if lambda expression support is the only thing those languages have going for them over Java). I work on a mixed Java/Scala codebase, and we just finished upgrading from JDK6 to 7. I don't see us tackling an upgrade to JDK8 anytime soon (probably won't be until JDK7 stops getting security patches).