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Haskell 2010 Announced
paltemalte writes "Simon Marlow has posted an announcement of Haskell 2010, a new revision of the Haskell purely functional programming language. Good news for everyone interested in SMP and concurrency programming."
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Amdahl's law is not like Moore's "law". Amdahl's law is an observation of mathematics. You can't ever get around the fact that if you increase the performance of 90% of the instructions in a program, you still have to deal with the other 10%. Even if you increase the performance of 90% of the instructions by 100x or something large, if the other 10% take a long time (like disk access) its going to kill your performance.
Erlang and Scala are both languages designed to support programming in a functional style, and both are "recursive style" languages in that they optimize tail calls generally (Erlang) or at least in the most important case of self-recursive calls (Scala) and thus make tail-recursive (or, in Erlang's case, more general tail calling with unlimited depth) programming styles efficient.
Neither is a pure functional programming language, true.
I would add a couple other "must have" features in functional languages:
* The ability to pass a function as an argument to another function (i.e. higher order functions, like qsort in the C standard library).
* Support for a points-free programming style in which things can be passed from one function to another without naming them.
Some other features that perhaps aren't technically required but make functional programming a lot easier:
* Closures, local function definitions, garbage collection, partial evaluation of function.