I hated static typing too until I learned Haskell. I dabbled in OCaml first and hated even that. Haskell and OCaml use the same basic paradigm for their type systems (Hindey-Milner), but Haskell's variant is more expressive. Typeclasses really made all the difference for me.

Also, Haskell is just a really, really difficult language, and it's hard to pass accurate judgment until you've mastered it. When I first started studying Lisp, it took about six weeks of intense study before I really felt like I grokked the language. Coming into Haskell with my existing Lisp background, it took me a year to feel the same way.

That last paragraph is probably what I most needed to read.

I did give The Haskell School of Expression a good whirl -- heh, I brought it down to south america with me, and hacked through a little of it each morning for a couple of months, swinging in a hammock and listening to waves crash and deciding that the water was probably still too cold to go out.

But although I understood what I was reading and understood what the code I had written did ... grok I did not.

I couldn't think creatively in Haskell AT. ALL.

Nonetheless, your comment heartens me. Please reassure me further: are you a person who has ever written or attempted to write a non-trivial mathematic proof?

Yes. I was a math major.

See, there's yer problem.

Err, I mean, my problem. Le double sigh.