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.
Um, I sort of doubt it. Unreal Engine 4, while I haven't dug around with it, is presumably still C++ and low-level stuff.
The way the game industry is moving is still along the same path. With a lot of amature and professional developers moving towards platforms like Unity, it's sort of a backslide in my opinion. Then again, it's almost as if the target platforms have become too powerful for people to really care what they're developing on.
"The Next Mainstream Programming Language"
(https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced...)