DomTool is built around standard ideas from statically-typed functional programming. In particular, we expect that anyone who is an expert Haskell and ML programmer will be able to learn the language easily by reading DomTool/LanguageReference. There is great benefit to learning the language and its type system: while most configuration systems force you to read prose documentation to learn how to use each directive, in DomTool, the type of each directive tells you exactly how it can be used. The standard library reference contains types for all of the directives, and you can save yourself a lot of time in learning new directives by being able to read the types in the reference.

We don't expect most HCoop members to ever understand the DomTool type system, which is why we have DomTool/Examples, but we like to make sure folks are aware of the potential benefits of learning something new.