Sisal
Sisal is a pure functional programming language that beats FORTRAN for number crunching, especially as it allows lots of automatic optimizations for parallel architectures.Unhappily, while focusing on number crunching performance, Sisal forgot many of those things that make functional programming so cool, and it seems that they got multidimensional arrays wrong, so there's room for a better language than SISAL.
People at LLNL have decided to stop developing SISAL so as to focus on their main job: designing weapons of mass destruction, for which they'll use FORTRAN and C++. Let's hope that these lame languages will slow down the race for means of world annihilation. Meanwhile, SISAL is kept alive as free software, whereas many former SISAL developers are working on a sequel to SISAL, SAC.
This page is linked from: Referential Transparency and State SAC