Even though this article comes from a reputable source, it should be pointed out that the author is not a researcher in the area -- and the decision not to include various MLs, OCaml, Scala, or F# in the chart of functional languages seems controversial. So this article does not speak for the community. If you want to read more about using Functional Programming in Industry, I would recommend Yaron Minsky's https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2038036 instead.
Why did the GOTO statement fall out of favor with programmers? If you look at Knuth's famous article weighting the importance of GOTO (https://pic.plover.com/knuth-GOTO.pdf) you can see many calculations where the GOTO statement can save you a tiny bit of runtime. Today, these matter far less than all of the other optimizations that your compiler can do (e.g. loop unrolling, inserting SIMD instructions etc). Similarly, in some domains the optimizations that functional compilers can do matter more than the memory savings mutation could bring.
Personally, I believe that with in the next decades memory usage will matter more, but even then functional programming languages can do well if they can mutate values that only they reference(https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2020/1...). This does not break the benefits of immutability, as other program parts can not observe this mutation.
I disagree with the articles premise that it is "hard to learn".. it might be today but it doesn't have to be. Monads are usually difficult for beginners, but algebraic effects are almost as powerful while being much simpler. They have slowly become mainstream (and might even make it into WASM!). It is an exciting time for functional languages and many people are working to make them even better!
Sure, they are in different language families. But a chart showing the "top dozen functional-programming languages" should include all languages that were given a separate workshop at the International Conference on Functional Programming (https://icfp22.sigplan.org/): Haskell, ML, OCaml, Scheme, Erlang, miniKanren (the last two are arguably specialised enough that they could be excluded to put more focus on general-purpose languages).
Why did the GOTO statement fall out of favor with programmers? If you look at Knuth's famous article weighting the importance of GOTO (https://pic.plover.com/knuth-GOTO.pdf) you can see many calculations where the GOTO statement can save you a tiny bit of runtime. Today, these matter far less than all of the other optimizations that your compiler can do (e.g. loop unrolling, inserting SIMD instructions etc). Similarly, in some domains the optimizations that functional compilers can do matter more than the memory savings mutation could bring.
Personally, I believe that with in the next decades memory usage will matter more, but even then functional programming languages can do well if they can mutate values that only they reference(https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2020/1...). This does not break the benefits of immutability, as other program parts can not observe this mutation.
I disagree with the articles premise that it is "hard to learn".. it might be today but it doesn't have to be. Monads are usually difficult for beginners, but algebraic effects are almost as powerful while being much simpler. They have slowly become mainstream (and might even make it into WASM!). It is an exciting time for functional languages and many people are working to make them even better!