Also, Standard ML. I learned Standard ML and created a couple toy systems in it before becoming utterly frustrated with the insane state of the "standard" libra

Also, Standard ML. I learned Standard ML and created a couple toy systems in it before becoming utterly frustrated with the insane state of the "standard" library[1] and fleeing to Haskell. I briefly considered OCaml, but of the MLish languages it seemed to me that OCaml had the ugliest syntax, so I chose Haskell instead. Dumb reason to choose a language, probably, but I absolutely adore Haskell. ...and I have spent an entire weekend trying to figure out how to describe within Haskell's type system something that is trivial in scheme[2] ! [1] In particular, there's a lot that's not in the SML spec that most people want in a stdlib, and every compiler's implementation is quite different. This means once you decide to use SML/NJ, if someone else has written a library you need, but for MLton, you're just up the creek. Perhaps this also happens with resp. GHC and Hugs, but I haven't found it to be nearly as much of a problem. [2] If you care: can I create a function that takes as its arguments another function and a list, and applies the elements of the list as arguments to the function? E.g., listApply (+) [1,2] should return 3. In scheme, assuming that you already have curried functions, this is trivial. In Haskell, it's exceedingly difficult. Consider: the approach in scheme, iterative partial applications, absolutely won't work in Haskell, since the types won't match: (+) has type (Num t) => t -> t -> t, but (+1) is (Num t) => t -> t. It turns out it's possible either with explicit isorecursive types (and some lifting functions) or using Template Haskell. For posterity, I posted both solutions on this old StackOverflow question I found when looking at how others had handled the same problem (viz., they hadn't, generally): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3775446/passing-list-elements-as-parameters-to-curried-function/4241972#4241972 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3775446/passing-list-elem...