[mrkeen]

> But it's such a beautiful and powerful language. Sigh.

Don't give up. Half of the time when a good language has problems, it just means that the bad languages don't have those problems yet.

You don't need global type-inference and monads to run into your problem. Dynamic languages exist, and even the static ones usually have some kind of 'var x =' local type-inference. And collections like Set probably have a map function.