> I use OCaml in this tutorial, with some occurrences of Haskell.
> My intention is for anyone familiar with the basics of typed functional programming to be able to follow along.
I don't know OCaml or Haskell and I got lost very early on due to the unfamiliar syntax. Do you think your explanation would be easy to translate to a more widely known language like Python or C?
I admit that I'm more fluent in OCaml than I am in Python or C, so please correct me if I'm mistaken.
The problem with other languages is that they lack the support for the higher order types, so the implementation is dishonest or you have to build up an API (new embedded minilanguage) to express them, which is a lot of work and a distraction.
And, the result tends to be very cluttered with syntax junk, as you can see in Scala and Functional Java.
Which incidentally is why people generally don't use these ideas in Java code. You can use these design ideas in your Java architecture, but not directly express them in your Java code.
And OCaml's module language is much more powerful than Java, since module language is a dependently typed language. You can't, say, pass a class including a type for another class in java.