Yeah, I've coded java, around the 1.4 days. I'm not too cool for it, I just don't care for it. Nor do I care for its philosophy. My rant addresses that most of "the best of" java also sucks. Albiet it sucks less than the stuff designed by committee.

I've coded erlang, but not haskell. Like both syntaxes much better than java.

Ok, point ceded on integers, now what do I do if I want to use a positive integer in excess of 2^63?

2^63 seems like a weird cutoff to me for positive integers, but keep in mind that features like this are the "best of" java according to you. I bought a 64 bit chip, I'd like to use more than half it's integer range.

My fav language is F# (preferred over OCaml because of VS and the #light syntax), but for webdev I usually use ruby/RoR because of the functionality available through gems. Making facebook/twitter integration work on ASP.NET MVC was more work than it should be last time I tried, and I hate all the hoops you have to jump through to make jQuery / json work with ASP.NET. Mostly I like F# because of the pipe and composition operators, inferred typing, records, active patterns, and a very succinct way of defining classes.

Pipe Operator:

  Seq.init 100 (fun x -> x*2)
  |> Seq.reduce (+)

Creates a sequence of numbers from 1 to 100 multiplies them by two and then adds together.

Composition operator:

  let add x y = x+y
  let mul x y = x*y
  let addFiveMultiplyBy20 = add 5 >> mul 20
  

Define a class

  type User(firstName,lastName,email) =
    property x.Name.get = x.firstName + x.lastName

I'm a little rusty on the class syntax so it might be off. Btw, the class that that would create would be fully generic with a requirement that the class of firstName and lastName have the (+) operator defined. So you could use the code:

  let user1 = new User("Foo","Bar","foo@bar.com")
  let user2 = new User(42,24,new EmailAddress("foo@bar.com"))

As well you could do this:

  let (+) (x:string) (y:int) = x + y.ToString();
  let (+) (x:int) (y:string) = x.ToString() + y;
  let user3 = new User(42,"Bar","foo@bar.com");