[spindle]

To answer your question directly, Haskell is too hard for me :-( I'm a pretty crap programmer - I was a professional back when you didn't have to be GOOD at it, you just had to be able to do it!

More interestingly, I wonder whether Haskell has, or lacks, the careful choice of orthogonal features that I love in a language.

[throwaway81523]

You might try OCaml. Haskell (like Common Lisp) is more a big soup of features than a carefully chosen orthogonal set. Standard ML (SML) is maybe more orthogonal than OCaml, but less used in practice.

[spindle]

Interesting - thank you!