Well, actually, unless you've tried using Haskell you probably don't realize the it has a type system completely different from 'other languages'. Really? Befo

Well, actually, unless you've tried using Haskell you probably don't realize the it has a type system completely different from 'other languages'. Really? Before I started using it, the only things I knew about Haskell were 1) it has a weird type system 2) it uses something called 'monads' and 3) doing IO is really really hard. #3 turned out to be false, #2 was true but not as scary as the hype, and #1 was true. It's not surprising that non-users know about the "odd" type system; types are one of the few ways arbitrary languages can be compared, so I know the type systems of many languages I've never so much as written Hello World in. About Blub: That's a stick you can use to beat anybody who criticizes any other language. Not so; one can use it to criticize anybody who claims a language is bad because it is more expressive than usual. For example, there are languages with more expressive type systems than even Haskell; if a programmer used to such language called Haskell inexpressive, it wouldn't make any sense to argue against them with Blub (regardless of whether he's correct).