jvranish

Those are all great languages. Haskell by no means has a monopoly on mind expanding features. But I think that the enforced purity of Haskell along with laziness and the powerful type system is a particularly brain twisting mix.

I use clang with a -Wall and -Wextra, which will complain about all sorts of stuff I generally want to know about, including unused variables (I think gcc does the same?). For the rare cases where I actually want to leave a variable unused I do the above to make the warning go away.

Actually, if you look closely you'll notice that not other language lets you do this either (except through an 'eval' or similar). What I think you actually mean is that this still doesn't let you use closures. But in fact it does! :D You'll have to do a lot of void * casting to make it work though.

It's still Turing complete (though that's not saying much really). You can always grow the stack more :P

Do you know of good resource for how to compute minimax polynomials that approximate transcendental functions? My Google foo appears to be failing me.

If your goal is accuracy, you are absolutely correct. But in the instances where I've wanted to implement my own versions of transcendental math functions, accuracy was actually pretty low on my list of priorities. Often just a couple terms of a taylor series was accurate enough, fast, and easy to implement.