What do I need to do to get paid to Scheme?

I'm a big fan of functional programming in general, Schemes in particular, and PLT-Racket ideally. I am wondering what concrete steps are likely to get me into 开发者_如何学编程a position where coding Scheme (or some functional language) is the bulk of the work.

I'm actually quite interested in academia, but on the other hand, I don't feel like I necessarily have what it takes (at least not at the moment) to do a top-tier Ph.D in CS. I definitely would prefer to have some real-world experience putting complex systems together in Scheme either way. Does anyone have any advice for an aspiring Schemer?

Start writing some Scheme libraries, then blog about the libraries you've wrote, get noticed in the community.

This will always give you leverage when applying for a position, employers like to have some evidence of what you can do.

dalton has the right idea; you want to build something you can show off. To find out about needs, you could go to http://srfi.schemers.org/, which is an archive of proposals for Scheme libraries and other improvements to Scheme, and see what you think you can contribute to. Or make contact with the Racket team; you may be able to contribute to Racket directly.

If you want to leverage something popular and in the news: App Inventor is based on Google Blocks, which are in turn based on Kawa, which is a Scheme dialect [*].

If you can show off your skills by putting together blocks and making them available for the community...it's a natural way to take advantage both of your multi-language skills and something currently getting press coverage.

Regards, Dak [*] and I forgot to say that earlier, mea culpa!

Not going to accept my own answer because it is, in general, worse than the one @dalton gave, but!

I got a grant through Turbulence.org to write an art and thus was paid to scheme! Or racket, if you want to be a pedant. repo here...

F# is getting popular in the finance sector:

http://cs.hubfs.net/forums/thread/16004.aspx