As a sidenote, while functional programming may "feel" academic, that may only be so that it only feels so because it is both (1) insanely cool and (2) not used enough in industry. Open discussion of FP techniques, whether in Haskell, OCaml, Lisp, or even Perl (or Ruby) is a Good Thing, as it lets more people see the wonder that lurks there -- and away from "everything is OO" mantra that is starting to make programming exceedingly boring.

There may be a lot of academics intersted in this sort of thing, but it's not just academic ... and it's definitely practical. In fact, it (functional programming and hybrid-functional programming) is incredibly powerful for development.

But yes, references are always good. I can Google for some stuff but it's always nice to read shiny examples others have written, especially when it's not your programming language of choice and you want to be exposed to it.