Lots of languages claim they are Scheme or Lisp dialects (JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Lua and others) in order to boost their popularity even though they have none of Lisp's unique features but just the general features you would expect to find in any dynamically typed languages.
That's a bit sad a great language like Haskell (I haven't personally used it but heard great things about it) is used for a hippie thing such as Facebook. Facebook doesn't even have much of a future, its a hippie fad just like Myspace was, eventually they'll get bored and find some new hippiespace social network: Snapchat, Whatsapp, whatever.
You know, you're not alone in thinking along these lines, but, if you would have just put a wee bit more effort into your wording, you could have made a good point out of it. Too bad you kept it even way below average Facebook post quality.
Oh and seeing how I'm actually responding now anyway, there's one more thing: use of the word "Hippie" does not actually qualify as name calling, you do know that, right? I do hope so; you see, it is mostly used in the cartoon Southpark, by a kid who is both the biggest bully of them all, and the most pathetic one as well. The ancipitality is really obvious, so I'm curious: was the satirical context so lost on you that you decided to copy this cartoon character's behaviour verbatim instead? Because in that case I think you could actually gain one or two social skills from Facebook! Chop chop, be a good lad now and give 'er a try, eh?
More like its FKF (Fear of the Known and Familiar). Most (if not all) programmers have experience with static typing and most of those experiences were not pleasant hence why a lot of people don't like static typing. People start to hate it even more when it gets shoved down their throats i.e. "You must absolutely must use static typing otherwise your software is unreliable and buggy".
Static typing requires discipline, it is no magic cure for bugs which will automatically make your programs correct, same way forcing everything to be in class in Java does not automatically make readable, modular and reusable code, its just restrictive and annoying.
The disciplines required for static typing to be effective can be employed in dynamic typing however merely having a static type system does not mean the discipline will be developed. In order for a static type system to not be restrictive (like Java's or C++'s) it has to be flexible i.e. it has allow types of varying degrees of vagueness. If I am an inexperienced programmer with no discipline nothing stops me from picking the vaguest type possible and making a complete mess. Type errors do not prevent all bugs, in-fact they prevent only a minimal subset of bugs, most bugs are related to logic errors involving an ill-thought out algorithm or data errors related to invalid data provided by the user which often can only be caught by dynamic type systems.
You can't pass a static method as an argument to another static method. You can't write a static method that returns a static method. You can't partially apply a static method. Static methods are not functions.
I think Kyllo was referring more to first-class/higher-order functions. I believe Java 8 added support for lambda expressions, but it's nowhere near the same thing.
That's the lack of higher order functions and the lack of first class functions. Anyway I think higher order functions and method references have been added to Java 8 as well as Lambda functions.
Doesn't Clojure already have optional static type annotations like Common Lisp? I thought it did when I looked through the tutorials.
In Common Lisp you can define pretty much any type (with deftype), you can define algebraic types and even value dependent types. Once you add full type declarations to your code, you will get warnings for inconsistent and violated type declarations.
