A quick comment concerning Haskell. I've been learning it on and off, with some help from my roommate who's a Haskell genius. The way he writes Haskell always amazes me. He starts with a very straightforward verbose version, then constantly refactors it (on the fly, it's not a separate step), abstracting stuff out in typeclasses and monads until it seems that most of the code is just monads and typeclasses definitions, and only a couple lines that seem to actually do something.
I always joke around saying that if your Haskell code doesn't have typeclasses and monads, you're doing something wrong. By which I mean that unlike other languages, there's a huge, huge, huge gap between writing great haskell, and regular haskell, with a very steep learning curve.
Interesting. I wonder about maintainability if the writer's "obvious" version is only there to be refactored out. Can you still read the intent when he's done?
I always joke around saying that if your Haskell code doesn't have typeclasses and monads, you're doing something wrong. By which I mean that unlike other languages, there's a huge, huge, huge gap between writing great haskell, and regular haskell, with a very steep learning curve.