[betterunix]

"Haskell and OCaml?! I know this is HN but these languages are pretty niche and only really used to any serious degree within academia"

Maybe so, but the programmers I know who have switched from C++ to Haskell/OCaml/F# never seem to regret it. They are getting more done in less time, and spending a greater fraction of their time writing good software than tracking down annoying low-level bugs. The small trade-off in performance does not seem to be an issue, and in the few places where it is, some C or assembly code invoked via an FFI solves the problem.

"C++ is still one of the most flexible languages for application development"

Only if you are not counting the overhead of actually getting a complex C++ application to work reliably. Even the new abstractions in C++11 and C++14 seem to force programmers to deal with low-level issues than in almost every case are a distraction from the high-level problem being solved.

[kenjackson]

How many top tier games are written in Haskell or OCaml? If you did I bet you'd be less productive than one using C++.

All languages make tradeoffs. You need to understand your domain and the tradeoffs associated with them.