On Sun, 9 Sep 2012, Dennis Raddle
Sadly, I've decided Haskell is not the right language for my current project. Python is better. I need to hack together data, and strict typing is getting in the way. Most of my algorithms are better served with imperative/mutable-data. I learned a lot about Haskell trying to do it, but my knowledge of the language is not quiet good enough and I feel like I'm fighting the language. Python is better. For now.
I always recommend Scheme. It is like Haskell in one respect: The Scheme Tribes keep the Ritual and the Law of Lambda. Scheme is different from Haskell in two respects: We Lispers do all our coding under the Great Functor, the Great Functor from Code to Objects in the Lisp World. For most Scheme systems, the Type Sub-System calculates less at compile time. Robert Harper has a new textbook available at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/plbook/book.pdf and here is a useful notice of the book http://blog.ezyang.com/2012/08/practical-foundations-for-programming-languag... ad missing the Great Functor: See remarks on "symbols" in the section 32.3 on page 321, and the discussion of observational equivalence in section 47.1 on page 498. A Lisper reading these sections might say "Ah, the Great Functor is worthy of study by New Type Theorists too. We Lispers consider a symbol to be a symbol first, and nothing else until you pass across one or more functors, and then the symbol might become many different things.". ad "dynamic typing" vs "static typing": Professor Harper's blog post http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/dynamic-languages-are-static... deals with this. I think the claim made, that "dynamic typing" is a special case of "static typing", is, when sympathetically read, right. oo--JS.