[dnautics]

IMO erlang (and arguably even more, elixir) is "functional for the working programmer". It doesn't drown itself in academic abstractions, uses functional programming as a tool to guardrail you from mistakes (in the same way that C guards the programmer from making asm mistakes), with escape hatches that are battle-tested and justified based on decades of experience.

I would say the only other functional language that has the same bent is Julia, which is "functional for the working scientist". It makes different choices about where to expose state, understandable, since scientific computing has different tradeoffs from systems programming.

[Grimm1]

Yeah I think that's a great way to frame it, historically one of the turn offs for me with FP was that it was overly academic when I am much more about how practical a tool the language is for what I'm trying to accomplish. Elixir was definitely the first FP that felt that way for me.

That said I have grown an appreciation for more esoteric languages and enjoy seeing the way they handle various problems it's just likely they'll never have a place in my toolkit.

[Cyph0n]

I think Scala is the ultimate "gateway" FP language, for better or worse. Kotlin would probably meet the requirements, though I've never used it.