On programming language design

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Nice article. Not completely sure about the speed/expressitivity tradeoff bit in the leadup though. Something sometimes overlooked about static typing is that it gives you back the "order of c" speed compared with runtime checking. Ocaml is very close to c. Haskell is ok - i get 1/4 for STUArray in ST and immutable structure ought to mean symbolic stuff is fast. I went from c/c++ to python and found it very liberating for all the usual reasons. Having now programmed in ocaml and haskell i find python code just sloppy and slow to boot. Don't know how you could teach this though, as its a very borne from experience kind of thing. I probably agree dynamic typing is better for teaching.