> I should note that most functional programming languages are
> designed by people with a strong academic/theoretical bent, rather
> than an industrial bent, and so issues like the type system get a
> lot more attention IMO than human engineering issues. I think the
> Modula-3 book by Nelson had a nice section on the language design
> with the different types of designer given colorful names like
> "Lambdaman", "Hackwell", etc. FPs appear to be designed by entire
> teams of "Lambdamen". (OK, perhaps I'm being a little bit
> provocative here ;-)

You certainly are provocative, as far as the Caml team is concerned:
we consistently insisted on practicability and usability of the
language, writing theoretical articles on better handling of
side-effects features, better design of modules to allow separate
compilation, better compilation of floating point numbers and
operations, etc; and then we implemented all those nice ideas into
fairly usable compilers. Last but not least ``concession'' to
praticability: this entire set of new basic types and operations for
integers and big arrays...

Best regards,
-- 
Pierre Weis

INRIA, Projet Cristal, http://pauillac.inria.fr/~weis