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Arguably the "new kind of Amish" are... just the Amish; they've continued to adopt new technologies when they comport with their particular values. Other intensional communities may have different values.

Love "Seinfeldians" :)

If StrictData were simply made the new default (with exceptions for lists and some other things in the standard lib), I bet very little code would break. It certainly wouldn't change the flavor of the language. I think it's a good idea.

I think this is right, but it's still IMO basically a natural language semantics issue. For instance in haskell (which has a pretty advanced static type system), I would still probably be satisfied with:

  -- A float between 0 and 1, inclusive.
  type UnitInterval = Float
  
  foo :: UnitInterval -> SomeResultPresumably
  foo accuracy = ...

i.e. I think the essential problem in the SO question is solved, even though we have no additional type safety.

A language without type synonyms could do just as well with CPP defines

I guess this is like "mammal" vs "mammalia".

FWIW Hudak's Haskell School of Expression was the first programming book I ever read, and probably the reason I do programming today.

Holy crap. He just tied the knot in prose form:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Tying_the_Knot

These are just flash drives. They get power through your USB port.