I think what the Haskell people are doing is mostly criticizing the way things are. They are saying instead of making do with a fudge that won't be followed nor applied consistently why not mechanize as much as possible into the tools?
When there is no choice you must make do but amongst those with choice, why not look for better tools? Haskell monads have already been mentioned. I await easy to use dependent types and or statically verified contracts. But till then many powerful but relatively simple though different concepts can already be used today. These give static leverage over many semantic issues. Giving the act of building a program a flavour of the elegance in Euclid's Elements.
As noted, monads are useful and available in any with parametric polymorphism or dynamic types * . Haskell has Generalized Algebraic Datatypes. Pattern Matching Views is available in Haskell,ocaml,f#, scala. predicate dispatch is mostly there in clojure. People should be doing as much as possible to reduce errors and mechanize as much as possible.
*I'm aware monads become really powerful with higher kinds and that you give up some guarantees when you drop purity and even more when you go dynamic but it still remains a powerful and useful mechanism due to the body of theory backing it.
When there is no choice you must make do but amongst those with choice, why not look for better tools? Haskell monads have already been mentioned. I await easy to use dependent types and or statically verified contracts. But till then many powerful but relatively simple though different concepts can already be used today. These give static leverage over many semantic issues. Giving the act of building a program a flavour of the elegance in Euclid's Elements.
As noted, monads are useful and available in any with parametric polymorphism or dynamic types * . Haskell has Generalized Algebraic Datatypes. Pattern Matching Views is available in Haskell,ocaml,f#, scala. predicate dispatch is mostly there in clojure. People should be doing as much as possible to reduce errors and mechanize as much as possible.
*I'm aware monads become really powerful with higher kinds and that you give up some guarantees when you drop purity and even more when you go dynamic but it still remains a powerful and useful mechanism due to the body of theory backing it.