I use both functional and imperative languages daily, and it's rather amusing to see the surge of adoption of functional languages from both sides of the fence. It strikes me, however, that it looks rather like a fad.

Do you think that it's a fad? I know the reasons for using functional languages at times and imperative languages in others, but do you really think that this trend will continue due to the cliched "many-core" revolution that has been only "18 months from now" since 2004 (sort of like communism's Radiant Future), or do you think that it's only temporary; a fascination of the mainstream developer that will be quickly replaced by the next shiny idea, like Web 3.0 or GPGPU?

Note, that I'm not trying to start a flamewar or anything (sorry if it sounds bitter), I'm just curious as to whether people will think functional or functional/imperative languages will become mainstream.

Edit: By mainstream, I mean, equal number of programmers to say, Python, Java, C#, etc