3 ms·

I think if you're in the staticly typed camp then Clojure isn't for you either way. While the keyword thing is reasonably bad, it's not the type of error I almo

by gleenn 8y ago

I think if you're in the staticly typed camp then Clojure isn't for you either way. While the keyword thing is reasonably bad, it's not the type of error I almost ever make (I'm definitely far from a perfect coder). I think your reaction is a little strong though, for a good reason. I think Clojure has many of these little nuances where strange parameters result in non exceptions, but I'm often surprised how useful they can be, and I think some are quite intentional. For instance, the map and merge functions can take nil collections as params and they have pretty useful properties. Usually if you see some weird stack trace it's typically easier than the author suggests to deduce type problems. The author points out a stray "@" symbol in his code throwing a confusing message about Futures. Well futures are a pretty first class language feature, so that would be pretty easy for figure out. Their complaint should be more about the sugary syntax of derefing using "@" than the bad error message. Clojure could use better stack traces, but I don't think throwing out a otherwise very elegant language is merited.

gkya 8y ago
I don't use staticaly typed languages (nowadays I'm trying Dart though, for Flutter). My main languages are Elisp, Perl, Python and Ruby. And some Posix shell. I'm a fan of Lisp. WRT keyword, I think that's a bug, not a nuance. This is the doc: > Returns a Keyword with the given namespace and name. Do not use : in the keyword strings, it will be added automatically. Nowhere does it say it returns sth. else than a keyword. Following is the doc for "intern" from Emacs Lisp, which does a similar job and signals "wrong-type-argument" with improper input: --- intern is a built-in function in ‘C source code’. (intern STRING &optional OBARRAY) Return the canonical symbol whose name is STRING. If there is none, one is created by this function and returned. A second optional argument specifies the obarray to use; it defaults to the value of ‘obarray’. --- So it does what it says or fails otherwise. This sort of error handling and streamlined, nice debugging is the best part of interactive programming; otherwise it's just Java with a lot of parentheses. Handling non-standard arguments in intuitive ways can be useful indeed, but not so if they are accidental, possibly working due only to implementation details, and undocumented.

by gleenn 8y ago

gkya 8y ago

I don't use staticaly typed languages (nowadays I'm trying Dart though, for Flutter). My main languages are Elisp, Perl, Python and Ruby. And some Posix shell. I'm a fan of Lisp. WRT keyword, I think that's a bug, not a nuance. This is the doc: > Returns a Keyword with the given namespace and name. Do not use : in the keyword strings, it will be added automatically. Nowhere does it say it returns sth. else than a keyword. Following is the doc for "intern" from Emacs Lisp, which does a similar job and signals "wrong-type-argument" with improper input: --- intern is a built-in function in ‘C source code’. (intern STRING &optional OBARRAY) Return the canonical symbol whose name is STRING. If there is none, one is created by this function and returned. A second optional argument specifies the obarray to use; it defaults to the value of ‘obarray’. --- So it does what it says or fails otherwise. This sort of error handling and streamlined, nice debugging is the best part of interactive programming; otherwise it's just Java with a lot of parentheses. Handling non-standard arguments in intuitive ways can be useful indeed, but not so if they are accidental, possibly working due only to implementation details, and undocumented.