>>15
how did monads not affect the way you think about programming? The idea that your program only needs n mutable things where n is the number of outputs and inputs, is, I think, really mind-shifting and important.
To be honest, I struggle to think of a dynamically typed language which is as idiomatically functional as Haskell or OCaml. Scheme perhaps. I think the reason for this is that functional programming as a style, require vigilance and strength. It always benefits your program in the end to reduce inessential side-effects, but we are all human and we all er. Haskell and OCaml don't let you.
Maybe that's a bad thing or a good thing. I'm not sayan. My point is that the essential reason these languages don't take off is not the static typing per se, but that functional programming is
hard.