[dman]

I would have loved this if the blog post contained more technical details and some code snippets about the tradeoffs involved. Functional languages cover a broad spectrum. There are often multiple concepts being explored in a language, then there is the issue of cultural heritage of the respective communities, and the fact that FP languages have traditionally had multiple implementations with different tradeoffs. as an example -> lisp and scheme are functional without being immutable. scheme favors a small spec while lisp includes large number of inbuilt primitives. Clojure introduces persistent datastructures and interesting new concepts like agents and integration with the jvm. I know too little about haskell and ML to make any informed comments about them but they appear espouse static typing unlike lisp / scheme. So if you have a particular beef about a functional language, look further and you will find one that doesnt share those traits.