This seems like a reasonable conclusion. Trying to learn the ins and outs of a new language/library/framework while trying to get something done is not a great

This seems like a reasonable conclusion. Trying to learn the ins and outs of a new language/library/framework while trying to get something done is not a great way to do either. My primary languages are Haskell and C++, and I write a lot of language tools. It seems to me that both languages are good choices in this department, but for very different reasons. Haskell is difficult to beat in terms of sheer data-munging expressiveness, and I spend 20% of my time in C++ doing what “deriving” does for me in Haskell, but if you know C++ well, you can use it to write very efficient code that’s still fairly expressive. That ain’t nothing. Maybe next time choose OCaml though. ;)