Rich is a smart person but I think he's missing some gaps in his knowledge of type theory and experience working with Haskell. In one of his recent talks he ma

Rich is a smart person but I think he's missing some gaps in his knowledge of type theory and experience working with Haskell. In one of his recent talks he made the claim that `Either a b` is not associative which.. well it is since it's provably isomorphic to logical disjunction which _is_ associative. I thought what he might be looking for are _variant_ types which are possible to implement in Haskell but are a bit complicated for reasons. There are libraries for it or you can try languages like Purescript or dependently typed languages like Idris, Agda, or Lean. Regardless I don't find his particular brand of vitriol appealing. If he doesn't really have a lot of experience working with Haskell like type systems, why does he feel the need to have an opinion about them? To be fair I used to have a lot of the opinions pointed out in the article and reflected in many of the comments here. An old blog post of mine [0] muses on the utility of static types. I was seriously into Common Lisp at the time. The problem with past me then was that I hadn't taken the time to learn and understand Haskell to form an opinion. I had learned Common Lisp out of frustration to win an argument that it as an old, crusty language that nobody used or needed anymore... and lost. I hadn't done the same yet for Haskell and would join the chorus of people repeating things like, "Haskell is an academic language but is not pragmatic for real-world use." It's embarrassing looking back on it. I've learned enough Haskell in recent years to ship a feature into a production environment and teach a small group of people to hack on it. It's pretty great and I much prefer working with it than I do with weakly-typed or dynamically typed languages. The amount of work I can do with the amount of effort I have to put in has a great ratio in Haskell. The initial learning curve to get there is hard but it's worth it in the end. [0] https://agentultra.com/blog/strict-types/ https://agentultra.com/blog/strict-types/