Back when I was good at Haskell, I would actually use it for exploratory stuff. At the time I think it mostly came down to which standard library I knew better.

Back when I was good at Haskell, I would actually use it for exploratory stuff. At the time I think it mostly came down to which standard library I knew better. Python has a huge stdlib, but I actually find prototyping difficult as I don't have my head in the game in terms of what function on X can I use for this purpose, what's the syntax for that again. Python has quite a lot of syntax / language-specific things to know when you think about it. And I've always found the docs hard to decipher. When prototyping I think I actually want: 1. Little language-specific knowledge you have to learn and remember when you know a lot of other languages. A lot of this is about API consistency. You should be able to recognise a pattern in how the API is organised, and just go from there. Python still doesn't do list.sort(), it's still sorted(list). WHY???? This shit gets in the way every time. 2. Really REALLY good documentation. This is incredibly important. I should go from googling what I want to do or looking up a method to a concise description and an officially maintained usage example in under 10 seconds. Rust is nailing it most of the time here. 3. Types. Trust me to say that, but autocomplete is one hell of a drug, and so is using it to break out of the write-compile-test loop WAY earlier, usually during the write phase. 4. Not necessarily a big standard library, but at least a very good, frictionless package/dependencies system. Rust is getting better at this, the community is even thinking about 'blessed' packages.