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Nice to see some lisp lovers in the frontend world. How does clojure handle types though, how would you argue with a typescripter for clojure rather than typesc

Nice to see some lisp lovers in the frontend world. How does clojure handle types though, how would you argue with a typescripter for clojure rather than typescript ?

sanatgersappa 7y ago
I wouldn't. I'd just finish the job and head off to the beach.
cutler 7y ago
You get immutability for free with Clojurescript which is a bigger win than types but if you must have types there's Clojurescript spec now: http://cljs.github.io/api/cljs.spec.alpha/
- lgessler 7y ago
  Adding to your point, spec goes beyond the power of a (garden variety) type system, since it does its work at runtime. This of course incurs a performance hit, but you can easily exclude these checks in a prod build just by setting a compiler flag.
ken 7y ago
I've come to the realization that what we mean when we say "programming" must be fundamentally different categories of activity for different people. I can't remember the last time I had a type error, or maybe if I did it was so trivial to fix that it's not sticking out. Type errors wouldn't even rate in the top ten categories of bugs that I make or encounter, so it seems odd to pick a programming language with that as a primary concern. All else being equal, it does seem nice at some theoretical level to have a compiler that checks type correctness, but there's lots of other issues that would also be nice to have the compiler handle, which it often doesn't. For example, TypeScript seems to (like JavaScript, so far) not have any bigints, which seems to me a much worse flaw than lacking a type checker. What good is it for the computer to check my usage of types, if it can't even do arithmetic correctly with them? But maybe this is just more of that nice feeling. I can't recall the last time I overflowed a fixint, either. (64 bits help with that -- or even 53 bits.) It's admittedly not a major practical concern in my daily programming life. Maybe there are people who fret about type safety the way I fret about overflow. I assume it must be a concern among some styles of programming, because I keep hearing about how languages without compile-time type checkers are bad, even though my experience does not agree. (Then people go and use languages where the type system is merely at the level of "Number" and "String", and it lets you pass a loop index to a function expecting a height in centimeters, and that's considered acceptably type-safe.)

Nice to see some lisp lovers in the frontend world. How does clojure handle types though, how would you argue with a typescripter for clojure rather than typescript ?

sanatgersappa 7y ago

I wouldn't. I'd just finish the job and head off to the beach.

cutler 7y ago

You get immutability for free with Clojurescript which is a bigger win than types but if you must have types there's Clojurescript spec now: http://cljs.github.io/api/cljs.spec.alpha/

lgessler 7y ago
Adding to your point, spec goes beyond the power of a (garden variety) type system, since it does its work at runtime. This of course incurs a performance hit, but you can easily exclude these checks in a prod build just by setting a compiler flag.

ken 7y ago

I've come to the realization that what we mean when we say "programming" must be fundamentally different categories of activity for different people. I can't remember the last time I had a type error, or maybe if I did it was so trivial to fix that it's not sticking out. Type errors wouldn't even rate in the top ten categories of bugs that I make or encounter, so it seems odd to pick a programming language with that as a primary concern. All else being equal, it does seem nice at some theoretical level to have a compiler that checks type correctness, but there's lots of other issues that would also be nice to have the compiler handle, which it often doesn't. For example, TypeScript seems to (like JavaScript, so far) not have any bigints, which seems to me a much worse flaw than lacking a type checker. What good is it for the computer to check my usage of types, if it can't even do arithmetic correctly with them? But maybe this is just more of that nice feeling. I can't recall the last time I overflowed a fixint, either. (64 bits help with that -- or even 53 bits.) It's admittedly not a major practical concern in my daily programming life. Maybe there are people who fret about type safety the way I fret about overflow. I assume it must be a concern among some styles of programming, because I keep hearing about how languages without compile-time type checkers are bad, even though my experience does not agree. (Then people go and use languages where the type system is merely at the level of "Number" and "String", and it lets you pass a loop index to a function expecting a height in centimeters, and that's considered acceptably type-safe.)