New functional languages

Question

Functional programming has been around since at least 1958 (creation of Lisp), but is experiencing a renaissance now with old functional languages being dusted off and new functional languages being created.

Which functional languages are there that are newly developed or are in the making?

I realize that you can write purely functional programs in most high level languages, so with functional languages I imply languages that are specifically designed for functional programming such as F#.

If you have links to tutorials, wikis or code examples I encourage you to add them to your answer!

Answer 1

Here's a short list of those I've tested so far (except for F#, which you've already mentioned):

1. Haskell (statically typed, pure) - Mind the free ebook Real World Haskell, with everything you need to know about it
2. Clojure (dynamically typed, unpure)
3. Scala (statically typed, unpure) - full (two way) interop with Java
4. Newspeak
5. Erlang - made for easily handling concurrency

Answer 2

Would like to add OCaml to the mix. I was attracted to it because it has a strong focus on performance. If I understand it right, F# is derived from OCaml.

But it is not just functional, it's well suited to imperative programming aswell.

Answer 3

Erlang, OCaml, Haskell, Scheme and domain-specific programming languages like R (statistics),Mathematica (symbolic math), J and K (financial analysis), and XSLT (XML)

Answer 4

Haskell has been around for a while, and a whole lot of basic stuff (enough for writing solid production applications) is done, but in many ways it's still an academic language. This is a beautiful thing, really: as a commercial programmer, I can get my job done well, yet I've got the ability to dip into some of the more interesting concepts and techniques that are not available in other languages without switching into dialects where I can't deploy my day-to-day code.

When programming in Haskell, it's fascinating to see the future so close that you can touch it.

Answer 5

I'm amused that ancient work like ML (Caml), Haskell, and Erlang is being passed off as "new." Scala is genuinely new, and F# is an attempt to adapt an old language ML into the .NET framework and is bound to be interesting.

If you want something really new, Agda is "the new Haskell". Agda incorporates the many lessons learned from 20-year-old languages like Haskell and 30-year-old languages like ML, and it pushes the envelope with the very latest work in type systems. Guaranteed to make your head explode or double your money back!

Answer 6

Well, if you want really new, try Babel-17. Only catch: there is no implementation of it yet :-) But there is a spec. Check out http://www.babel-17.com .

Answer 7

Functional programming has now been adopted in the mainstream so what was formerly an academics-only drive has now split into academic and industrial implementations.

F# is a high profile example of an industrial functional language in development (here is an example of John Conway's Game of Life with GUI written in 32 lines of F#, here is my book on F#). Others include Clojure by Rich Hickey and HLVM by myself.

Recent high profile functional languages from academia are ATSLang and Scala.

Answer 8

A new functional language with a main focus on metaprogramming:

http://www.meta-alternative.net/mbase.html

Some examples: http://www.meta-alternative.net/pfront.pdf

Answer 9

Nemerle is a functional, statically typed language with extensive metaprogramming support for .NET. Like F#, it was inspired by ML, but it's syntax follows closely to C#, making it much more readable. Type inference in Nemerle is even more powerful than ML's, allowing it to infer types from usage in presence of overloading.