For example: what is the benefit of reducing these data structures (and associated algorithms which operate on them) to more generic versions?
> There's one additional cool feature of Scala collections which I haven't touched on yet: transformations can result in collections that are different from the original collection type, and the most specific collection that is compatible is used. What does that mean? Say I map a TreeSet from an ordered element type to an unordered type. The result type can no longer be stored in a TreeSet, so you get a more generic Set collection instead. I'm curious what it would take to implement this in Haskell.
While I agree that this is "cool" that you can do that, I really don't see the use of it except when sketching out ideas when you're not sure what kind of data flow you want yet... but that seems like a problem with designing the program and should be avoided.
But at this point you're still way behind Scala. What about flatMap, filter, slice, drop, scan, etc? Every collection in Scala has a huge set of methods that work on it. But they're not implemented again and again, because the type system is powerful enough to prove that the generic code that works for Set can be used for List. In contrast, every Java program is full of innumerable primitive operations expressed again and again, so you have to keep reading the steps of every for loop to determine, "oh, this one is doing forall. This one is map" rather than simply reading "forall", "map". Which is why, thanks to the above complexity, Scala can be much more readable than Java.
What about Haskell? The existing standard library is fairly weak on collections. There are not that many implementations, and there's no typeclass that quite captures the idea of a collection: you've got Foldable, Functor, Monad, and possibly some others, which all get slightly different aspects of it. Small typeclasses are nice in that they allow more instances, but often you need some functions that aren't there. There's no typeclass which captures the size() function, for instance. That's mostly a library design issue, which is more tractable than a language issue, but still pretty hard to fix.
There's one additional cool feature of Scala collections which I haven't touched on yet: transformations can result in collections that are different from the original collection type, and the most specific collection that is compatible is used. What does that mean? Say I map a TreeSet from an ordered element type to an unordered type. The result type can no longer be stored in a TreeSet, so you get a more generic Set collection instead. I'm curious what it would take to implement this in Haskell.