In certain circumstances, new languages can help software engineers to get high performance. For example, the lift project at the university of Edinburgh. It's

In certain circumstances, new languages can help software engineers to get high performance. For example, the lift project at the university of Edinburgh. It's a skeletal (think functional, but on the immutability/higher order functions rather than category theory) domain specific language for writing GPU kernels in. The team there have managed to use it to implement matrix-multiplication kernels that beat everything apart from NVIDIA's own assembly language implementations, just by using the safety and separation of concerns that a functional approach brings.