I agree that it's foolish to ignore memory issues. We've had horrific performance and scaling in much software that did that. Anyone thinking otherwise can feel free to disable their processor or app cache to see how unimportant memory concerns are. ;)
Any HLL should give performance-concerned designers a clear, mental model of the performance aspects of their code. C and C++ programmers, for instance, understand the costs of their abstractions, how to code in a cache-efficient way, and so on. I read on the old LISP web sites and mailing lists where they similarly could estimate the cost of certain constructions and had tricks to squeeze out extra performance that they hid behind macros, etc. So, I'm sure these other functional languages can do something similar.
Any HLL should give performance-concerned designers a clear, mental model of the performance aspects of their code. C and C++ programmers, for instance, understand the costs of their abstractions, how to code in a cache-efficient way, and so on. I read on the old LISP web sites and mailing lists where they similarly could estimate the cost of certain constructions and had tricks to squeeze out extra performance that they hid behind macros, etc. So, I'm sure these other functional languages can do something similar.