[hderms]

I think one distinction is that typeclasses let you add some new 'interface' like Fooable and then implement them for standard types like String and Int as well as allow the user of the library to implement a version as well. With generic programming like Shapeless in Scala one could also recursively derive a Json decoder based on having Decode defined for all the components types of some nested arbitrary data object.

A lot of this stuff is possible in other languages for varying definitions of 'possible' which usually comes down to how much code you have to write to do this, how flexible it is with code you haven't explicitly written (i.e. standard prelude types or what have you) and how much the ecosystems that exist in these languages are oriented in a manner which takes advantage of these features.

Consider nullability in Java and how pervasive it is. Java has tons of great software but the type system is lacking based on how many functions could return null but don't document it, could throw an exception but don't document it, etc... This is predominantly because actually handling nullability on the type level, or error handling on the type level is not straightforward in Java.