" I know there are people who build incredible things out of monads, or inventing monadic metatypes I'm unable to grasp, and generally doing stuff never done b

" I know there are people who build incredible things out of monads, or inventing monadic metatypes I'm unable to grasp, and generally doing stuff never done before. But that is merely a sign of great cleverness of these people; One could, I suppose, say that it's like a treadmill with wheels that are connected to the running belt but slightly downgeared: you can use it to move on a street by exercising walking with your legs but most people choose to just.. you know, walk directly." This is the flakiest analogy (not to say a condescending one) I've seen here in a while. The exact same argument could be made for writing a macro in Clojure vs just writing out the code in java. "yes you could write a clever macro and there are clever people doing it but other people just, you know, walk" Some programmers have trouble grasping monads. Others have trouble grasping macros. Others (believe it or not,) recursion (Ron Jeffries, an agile "guru" said "Recursive methods tend to be confusing, in my opinion." http://xprogramming.com/xpmag/dbchaskellbowling/ http://xprogramming.com/xpmag/dbchaskellbowling/), Others TCO (see Tim Bray's recent rant for e.g). When some programmers look at powerful languages they see, "merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well.". - PG on the blub paradox. Insert clojure and haskell appropriately and this sums up your argument. People who don't "get" monads and/or or how powerful type systems work think languages with those features are "weird" or "too clever" and languages without them are "better". So what's new? So yes, in spite of your " I don't want to come across as a language troll" disclaimer, you do come across as a borderline fanboi/troll. Not sayng you are one, but your argement comes across that way. Subtle condescension is still condescension. fwiw.