Agreed on the first part, unfortunately most functional languages are difficult for most developers (read: non-academics or HN readers) to grasp. As somebody wh

Agreed on the first part, unfortunately most functional languages are difficult for most developers (read: non-academics or HN readers) to grasp. As somebody who taught me ML said: "if it's difficult to write, it should be difficult to read". Perhaps this will change, but it will be a while before we have a functional language that's as mainstream as JavaScript. Most big websites have asynchronous components to address their performance bottlenecks, but the bulk of the business logic uses synchronous I/O and unfashionable languages like PHP as per the 90/10 law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_optimization#Bottlenecks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_optimization#Bottleneck...