[rntz]

> Lets consider the rather remarkable backflips Standard ML and OCaml had to perform in order to make FP work with strictness and impurity.

What backflips are these?

Apart from the value restriction (which is a real albeit minor inconvenience; I find it about as annoying in practice as Haskell's monomorphism restriction, and each can be removed in principle, at the cost of making it harder to reason about the semantics/cost of using a variable), I'm honestly not sure what you have in mind.

On a tangent, I'm not sure when statically-enforced purity (as opposed to purity-by-default) and pervasive laziness (as opposed to laziness-as-a-tool) became culturally defining features of FP. The original FP language, Lisp (and even its "this FP stuff is great, let's have some more" cousin Scheme) is impure and strict. I'm grateful to Haskell for trying to answer the question "just how far can we push these purity and laziness ideas", but I don't think that complete purity or laziness are necessary features for FP. They're just tools in its toolbox. But then, I have always been inclined to pluralism.