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0 pointsbcrosby953y ago0 comments

If you want an easy win, one thing Rich mentioned in a talk is - if he had to do Clojure all over again today - he would put transducers at the 'bottom'. For data transformation this makes the underlying collection type largely immaterial.

> real structs

I'm not even sure if value types are conducive towards immutable, persistent data structures. I'm certainly excited for project Valhalla but I'm not sure if Clojure, nor any Clojure-like JVM language, written in an idiomatic fashion, would really benefit from it.

> light-weight concurrency like Go

Project loom is already in preview mode. Lightweight concurrency is nearly here for any JVM language, and once it's fully released I will likely have zero reason to use core.async.

> type support

Static typing is A Thing you can choose to do, but I doubt you would get many daily Clojure users agreeing that it is "better". I think it's different and better in some circumstances but not necessarily others. It definitely feels trendy these days, sorta like how dynamic typing felt trendy 15 years ago.

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hota_mazi3y ago

Clojure users fighting against static typing are on the wrong side of history. They are fighting a side for all the wrong reasons, and they will lose.

There is a reason why all dynamically typed languages today are scrambling to add some form of static typing to their language, but never the other way around.

Static typing does everything dynamic typing does, but better, faster, allow automatic refactoring, faster programs, better navigation, better documentation, better maintenance.

chitowneats3y ago

I understand the point you're making, and that you wanted to make it dramatically. I got a nice belly laugh thinking about my future grandchildren chastising me for forsaking static types:

"All your life's work for naught, Pepaw. If only you had been on the right side of history".

I do have a substantive disagreement with this statement: "There is a reason why all dynamically typed languages today are scrambling to add some form of static typing to their language, but never the other way around".

Languages like C#, Java, Scala, and Typescript have all adopted some degree of type inference. Their users wanted it for a long time. To begin with, none of these languages are anywhere near as strictly-typed as a language like Haskell. Clearly even developers on "the right side of history" don't want to maximize static type checking in all cases, so the issue is not as cut and dry as you make it sound.

blevin3y ago

Or maybe it isn’t a war, there isn’t anyone fighting, and there’s nothing to be lost.

johannboehme3y ago

You are wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5WdGrpoug Static typing only leads to devs trying to press the real world in stupid arbitrary categories.

yladiz3y ago

Yeah and spec isn’t trying to press the real world into arbitrary categories? /s

The thing is, having some structure in terms of types or data shape constraints helps you model and understand your program. You can change them as your understand of your program changes or the need arises. You can be against static types because they force you to slow down and think about things before you can just get to coding, and it can be sometimes annoying to model your system using them (and sometimes not so useful), or other technical reasons like some type systems don’t allow you to model certain things, but to say it just leads to devs putting the real world into stupid, arbitrary categories when the real world (and your program!) primarily have data that can be trivially categorized because that’s what Rich Hickey said makes you sound like cargo-culting or parroting a point without diving deeper into the specific reasons and potential counterarguments.

goldrake3y ago

IMHO, external schema to validate structures at entry point is the way to go.

We have to have both: types and external schemas in oo languages.

Plus, types make working with maps cumbersome and force you to maybe unnecessary data cages called dto-s

epgui3y ago

I also believe the same thing.

However, to be fair, Clojure's response to types is `org.clojure/spec.alpha`, and if you give it a really good chance, you'll see that it brings a lot to the table.

It doesn't change that I believe strong typing (a Haskell or Idris/Agda-like flavour of it) to be the future, but what it did change was how I thought about type systems and how to write and test programs.

fiddlerwoaroof3y ago

Yes on the type support not really attracting Clojure users. If you wanted to enable better refactoring, the thing to do would be to take more pages from other lisps and use the compiler to add more metadata to the runtime (in development mode at least) so that you can get better tracking of the language constructs.

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