I mean, the first real programming I did was with logo. Why was it fun? Because the it resulted in pretty pictures and animations. When I started programming pascal, C, and assembler, it was 320x200x256 graphics that made it fun (that and TSRs).
Programs need to do something to be exciting. Sorting lists and building trees is certainly interesting, but doesn't inspire that "I need to figure out how they did that" feeling that every programmer my age will have felt when he/she first saw Doom or Wolfenstein, or in my case, Strike Commander.
As much as I like merb, I would like it _much_ better if it was in erlang or scala. lift, erlyweb, mochiweb, etc are still not at the ease of use level of the ruby frameworks. There will be a tipping point, I hope ;).
Agreed, strongly. Look at extlib ( http://code.google.com/p/ocaml-extlib/ ) and such, though. While OCaml's official standard library has some infuriating gaps, the unofficial standard library makes up for many of them (and the core language is quite good).