At least I'm smart enough to know that these days rather than foraging onward to my death. As such I'm going to try to learn during this 3 week spurt of motivation before whimsy comes again. I've browsed through some articles on set/type theory, traits, mixins, some of the functional language type systems... and think it's due time to pickup a new language.
I'd been looking at Python for a while given its high recommendations by respected members of the forums, but little about it seems appealing. Everything I've seen and heard makes it sound like slightly beautified perl. Bleh. Plus I don't have that much motivation to work beyond my admitted bias against mixing code format and function.
Plus it's not 'different' enough to be of primary benefit I think. So I'm going to work with F# for the coming weeks. I've not seen abject arguments against it, it has enough IDE and library support so it's not too different or motivation sapping. Plus I hope that the interop possibilities will allow it to avoid the impracticality argument leveled against its functional kin. I dabbled with scheme a little, but the poor IDE and impracticality quickly deterred that path. Let's see if this doesn't provide a more palatable option that I can leverage into more esoteric things. Or if I don't get sick of it and give python a shot despite my misgivings.