[stingraycharles]

Thanks for your reply, I think this is a matter of interpretation of what functional actually means. I personally consider the fact that Scala allows you to get away with immutability so easily (as evidenced with the implementation of all the immutable collections) a very bad thing. It might be just a matter of taste, though; Scala was my gateway drug to functional programming, and I considered implicit parameters and all these immutable containers something very un-functional.

You cannot get away with these things as easily in the Erlang VM (and thus Elixir). I agree with your assessment that Clojure with its macros is an ugly hack, and requires discipline to get right.

Having said that, Haskell also takes a lot of discipline to get right (no lazy I/O, for example), and allows you to get away with ugly things as well (unsafePerformIO). The type system makes it a lot easier to get right though (or in other words, more difficult to do the wrong thing).