You may have come across it already but you might be interested in "Time Reborn" by Lee Smolin. His opinion is that mathematics is a fine tool but it has lead physics to the "block universe" perspective. A reversible universe that is driven by pure immutable laws. He claims that time and spontaneous change are important.
It crossed over with some of my experience of programming. Recently he wrote "The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time" with Roberto Unger, but I haven't read that yet.
> They need a much better idea of time (such as approaches to McCarthy's fluents).
I am not sure what the time problem is for functional programming, but I reckon the Elm language/framework solves problems with time in a very elegant way with it's flavour of FRP and Signals.
In Elm, you can play back your UI interactions in a debugger as they happened and watch the variables as they would have been!
