Haskell is from 1990 and OCaml from 1996, it's not awfully recent. > Both clojure and haskell have mutability, just at differing granularities (haskell monads,

Haskell is from 1990 and OCaml from 1996, it's not awfully recent. > Both clojure and haskell have mutability, just at differing granularities (haskell monads, clojure replace the world object). They can do it with referential transparency though (which is probably your meaning, obviously pure immutability is impossible and not sensical). Well, you have to have to be able to manipulate state somehow (even if, at least on the surface, the state monad emulates mutability, as opposed to, eg, OCaml's notion of mutation, which is very explicit in what it does). But the point is that it is not the path of least resistance in these languages.