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Arguably the "new kind of Amish" are... just the Amish; they've continued to adopt new technologies when they comport with their particular values. Other intensional communities may have different values.

Love "Seinfeldians" :)

If StrictData were simply made the new default (with exceptions for lists and some other things in the standard lib), I bet very little code would break. It certainly wouldn't change the flavor of the language. I think it's a good idea.

I think this is right, but it's still IMO basically a natural language semantics issue. For instance in haskell (which has a pretty advanced static type system), I would still probably be satisfied with:

  -- A float between 0 and 1, inclusive.
  type UnitInterval = Float
  
  foo :: UnitInterval -> SomeResultPresumably
  foo accuracy = ...

i.e. I think the essential problem in the SO question is solved, even though we have no additional type safety.

A language without type synonyms could do just as well with CPP defines

I guess this is like "mammal" vs "mammalia".

FWIW Hudak's Haskell School of Expression was the first programming book I ever read, and probably the reason I do programming today.

Holy crap. He just tied the knot in prose form:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Tying_the_Knot

These are just flash drives. They get power through your USB port.

I was exposed to these before the Wilco album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" (which uses number station samples). It was fun to have my mind blown by the album and then explain to my friend (who introduced me to the album) about number stations.