[YorkshireSeason]

If you speak Scala, I recommend that you familiarise yourself with Scala's implicits. The latter are a generalisation of type classes. You can implement the latter using the former, see e.g. [1]. If you speak ML/OCaml/F#, then Oleg's [2] might also be easily accessible.

[1] B. C. Oliveira, A. Moors, and M. Odersky. Type classes as objects and implicits. https://ropas.snu.ac.kr/~bruno/papers/TypeClasses.pdf

[2] O. Kieselyov, Implementing, and Understanding Type Classes. http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/typeclass.html