[tsuberim]

I got into Haskell a while back and dove deep into the purely functional, strongly typed, category theory rabbit hole. This small but very hard-core community exposed me to completely different (and radical) ideas about programming, software engineering and PL design after I was sure I've seen everything under the sun when it comes to PLs. I soon turned into one of those annoying zealots that keeps preaching functional programming. After a while, I wanted to write my own language/s and set out to build a compiler in Haskell, I kept wanting to make it more and more general brushing against the edges of what the type system could handle and thinking in more and more abstract category theory terms until I just gave up. I felt that the type system was restricting my thinking. Another example of this absurdity in the Haskell way of thinking is a very general scala library: https://github.com/slamdata/matryoshka .

TL;DR: Haskell makes you think in a deep, general and often very beautiful mathematical way which makes you write beautiful but unintelligible code for the non-mathematician programmer.

The switch came when I became increasingly fascinated by machine learning (which is written mostly in Python). Programming in Python felt extremely liberating to me, I could express complex ideas with minimal number of lines that was also obvious for others to read. This is not to say that I abandoned the ideas I learned from the functional land, on the contrary, I still think in a very functional way and Python only made it so much easier to express those concepts. A powerful middle-ground between the two approaches is gradual typing (ie. mypy or typescript) which lets you take advantage of type checker without letting it get in your way, this is the best of both worlds for me.

TL;DR: Strong types are for weak (or lazy) minds. Python FTW.