This is similar to a talk that Tim Sweeney (Epic Games) gave about creating a new language for games, that I thought was interesting. In particular, he talks about the tradeoffs of using C# over C++ for game development, and then talks about ways that ideas from Haskell or purely functional languages can be brought over that might improve performance and productivity for developers.

"The Next Mainstream Programming Language"

(https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced...)