For what it's worth - I'm a professional lisp dev who greatly admires the ML family and its ilk (Haskell, Miranda, etc). I'm not very good with them (yet), but

For what it's worth - I'm a professional lisp dev who greatly admires the ML family and its ilk (Haskell, Miranda, etc). I'm not very good with them (yet), but I can appreciate the safety guarantees of a good type system (as long as it has decent inference and can avoid the ridiculous verbosity of Java). As a rule of thumb, if I want to hack something up quickly, and I use Lisp (or python/perl). If I want something safer, easier to maintain (not necessarily extend though ...), etc I like languages with stronger typing and more powerful static analysis.