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>bondage-style type systems

For the rest of you, when somebody describes Haskell in this manner you can be assured of a few things.

One, they don't know Haskell better than extremely superficially. Two, they don't understand parametricity and haven't read the papers. Three, they don't know what it's like to do the same kind of work (day-to-day programming) in a dependent type system.




I personally call Haskell's type system "paranoid". Yet I have no difficulty asserting that it's way more flexible than C++'s or even Ocaml's (which makes you route around the value restriction, and the lack of type classes).

I love paranoid type systems: they debug my thinking up front.


> haven't read the papers

I've never needed to read a paper to understand any other language. If I need one to learn Haskell, that's an immediate downside.


You don't need to read any papers to use Haskell, but if you're going to explain the type system, you need to understand how it actually works.


Some fine ad hominems; claiming I don't get ad hoc polymorphism? How dare you :).

Haskell isn't dependently typed, at least not yet.


The deeper point is that you don't yet understand parametricity, something Scala managed to blow right past.




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