My apologies, that portion of my point was meant to be independent of the FP comparison. It is absolutely true that, save for the occasional grudging exception, the 'easy languages' have largely been scorned and shunned throughout programming history. Hell, I've been guilty of it myself where HyperTalk is concerned despite loving the concept.
As for "getting work done" in Lisps/FP, I earnestly recommend checking out Racket. The developers have said that they've aimed to create 'the Python of Lisps' and by and large they've succeeded at exactly that. The documentation is thorough, the functional tools live alongside OOP and imperative ones quite nicely, the standard library is enormous, and DrRacket makes for a very good 'just open up the damn editor and start writing' tool.
Really, most of the FP languages are much more multi-paradigm friendly than Haskell, to the extent that I wouldn't even consider CL a functional-first language at all. CL's problems there are more a lifetime of neglect + Emacs loyalty, though Allegro and LispWorks offer more 'everyone else' friendly options. F# is fantastic as well, and integrates nicely with the rest of .NET and allows for a mixed paradigm while still getting all the functional tools and the power of type inference on top.
As for "getting work done" in Lisps/FP, I earnestly recommend checking out Racket. The developers have said that they've aimed to create 'the Python of Lisps' and by and large they've succeeded at exactly that. The documentation is thorough, the functional tools live alongside OOP and imperative ones quite nicely, the standard library is enormous, and DrRacket makes for a very good 'just open up the damn editor and start writing' tool.
Really, most of the FP languages are much more multi-paradigm friendly than Haskell, to the extent that I wouldn't even consider CL a functional-first language at all. CL's problems there are more a lifetime of neglect + Emacs loyalty, though Allegro and LispWorks offer more 'everyone else' friendly options. F# is fantastic as well, and integrates nicely with the rest of .NET and allows for a mixed paradigm while still getting all the functional tools and the power of type inference on top.