> The fact is that functional idioms work badly in languages that don't have syntactic support for them.
You can even remove functional from the sentence. Powerful features of languages like Python and Lisp don't get you more power than languages like Java. They give you more power per unit of effort.
The definition of power is energy per unit of time. Similarly, the common usage of the word power as applied to programming languages means pretty much that: you get more out of your work. In this analogy energy would correspond roughly to computability, which is not quite so useful a concept to measure. (Of course the analogy breaks down--energy can be indirectly measured, but computability is a yes-or-no question.) http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html
You can even remove functional from the sentence. Powerful features of languages like Python and Lisp don't get you more power than languages like Java. They give you more power per unit of effort.