We did have practical functional programming languages 20 years ago. PG has been very vocal about the advantages of using Common Lisp to create Viaweb. Viaweb s

We did have practical functional programming languages 20 years ago. PG has been very vocal about the advantages of using Common Lisp to create Viaweb. Viaweb started the summer of 1995 and meets my bar for practicality. To the best of my knowledge, functional programming languages weren't as widely used then but it was not because no practical languages existed.