Functional Programming continues the strong growth it has experienced in the last few years. This niche within IT is mostly active outside Malta (predominantly in the EU), while locally there are just a handful of organizations hiring within this space. The most established language within the Functional Programming space is Scala.
Due to its growing demand, Scala has created many new career opportunities with projections of this continuing to rise in 2022 and going forward. The Maltese market is starting to see a few companies adopting the programming languages such as Scala but mainly within the data space and there is rarely a use for pure Scala Engineers. Many technical managers are looking for Scala Engineers who have experience with Functional Programming frameworks such as Cats, Shapeless or ZION.
With the emergence of Blockchain and Crypto companies, Rust programming language has gained massive momentum which has resulted in very lucrative opportunities for the early adopters of Rust. Due to its safety and reliability, Rust is expected to become the programming language of choice for Crypto and Blockchain companies. Haskell and Rust are seen as very advantageous skills to have as they are a niche within Functional Programming.