The initial criteria was strongly typed and functional first. Using an LLM for answers, of course, that returned me a list that looked like:

- Haskell

- OCaml

- F#

- Scala

- Gleam

- Purescript

- Grain

- Idris

Then I asked if there were any Schemes or Lisps that met the initial requirements, which added a bunch more options (Typed Racket, Typol, Elm, ReScript etc).

Then I asked about Julia specifically, as it's a language I'm already reasonably familiar with and knew that it's possible to write it with static annotations.

Next I started filtering the list based on additional criteria; didn't want to target a JS compilation target, performance, size of package ecosystem, tooling, community, learning curve (I do want to review and understand the output).

There were a bunch of follow-up questions over a few hours of prompting, reading and a couple of beers. All this resulted in the shortlist of OCaml, Typed Racket and Julia.

Julia pretty much remains in there, even though it doesn't really meet the strongly typed initial criteria, based on my familiarity, the ecosystem especially for AI/ML tasks and performance factors.

I know zero about OCaml and find the thought of learning it a bit daunting. Typed Racket seems more approachable anyway.