Actually, the metaphor works fine. Haskell doesn't fundamentally try to restrict what is done, but how it is done. Some things may be harder to do because of th

Actually, the metaphor works fine. Haskell doesn't fundamentally try to restrict what is done, but how it is done. Some things may be harder to do because of those restrictions, but they don't become entirely impossible, even if eventually you might find a corner case where you have to modify the language itself. Constitutions can (usually) be amended. The US Constitution in particular has essentially no restrictions on what can be done by amendment (and it's pretty obvious that the one operative restriction can be dealt with if necessary). This is done out of knowledge of our own ignorance -- we cannot possibly conceive of every situation society will face, nor how our governance models will interact with those situations. This is why libertarianism irritates me. It comes across as such an absolute. Few things are absolutes, and when you're talking about something that will affect millions of people, you can't realistically expect to arrive at an absolutely right solution that will work for everybody every time.