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Types almost never save the day and they don't add much to the understanding. The code should be structured and documented in such a way that you are able to un

Types almost never save the day and they don't add much to the understanding. The code should be structured and documented in such a way that you are able to understand it, reason about it and swap implementations of stuff in the places where such flexibility is handy. E.g. in Clojure, I can trivially test my functions in the context of the application using the REPL. I don't have to reload anything, I do it right in the namespace I am modifying. I can also just look at the data there. Also Clojure is way more consistent and you can probably learn all the functions in clojure.core and some of the typical libraries by heart. These functions then work basically on anything you will do and are almost 100% transferable to ClojureScript. For sysadmin-like tasks, for most stuff you can use Babashka, which is a limited Clojure + some frequently used libraries implementation with very fast startup thanks to GraalVM. For the rest, Python/ Perl etc. will probably still have a bit better standing because of all the libraries e.g. working with SNMP.

Aperocky 6y ago
That's strongly dependent on how big the code base is. I'm a huge python fan, and I don't like/use IDEs on my personal projects. But eventually I still gravitated towards typescript because it had typing and the compiler + unit tests giving me a huge boost in ability to extend my project beyond a certain size. I think the threshold is around 50-100 files, but smaller code bases also benefits from the typing structure.
- kaliszad 6y ago
  At OrgPad, we are well over 100, maybe even 200 namespaces in Clojure and ClojureScript and I don't think we have any trouble keeping up. Most of the problems we have are frankly not in any capacity connected to Clojure or ClojureScript but rather half-baked, inconsistent technologies and their implementations like CSS, browser interoperability/ APIs mostly. The server-side (Clojure) is rather boring currently, so can't say much about that - most of the stuff seems to be just ok. There seems to be a lack of libraries for transforming image/ video formats in Java for the newer formats like WebP, AV1. Probably most people drop to imagemagick/ ffmpeg? That is kind of a problem, but not really pressing. We have lost much more time to CSS and bad browser APIs.
tiew9Vii 6y ago
> Types almost never save the day and they don't add much to the understanding. There’s a saying in strongly typed languages “make illegal states unrepresentable”. Java doesn’t let you get all the way there but it’s better than nothing. When you look at strongly typed languages with a good type system, often when you compile it just works. Besides hello world, I’ve never written program beyond a few lines that has just worked in a dynamic language. ...I do like clojure and the repl workflow and how everything is data. Haven’t done much besides play with it but have a friend who writes clojure professionally on a large codebase and their feedback is most of the errors they now see wouldn’t exist with a type system.
- kaliszad 6y ago
  Can you be more specific about your friends codebase? How large, what industry/ problem space? Of course, you can write bad/ unmaintainable code in any language. I have seen such code in Clojure(Script) as well. But some languages really encourage bad code where other languages already feel like you are doing something wrong when you write bad code. (e.g. Using many atoms in Clojure, doing boolean transformations etc. just from the top of my head.) Strongly typed languages in my experience don't help anything, make programming harder for everybody and the benefit is (for most software) questionable. Compilers should handle most types for us and only give us a hint something could be better, if we were more specific e.g. with a type hint. Humans should think about the problems not about deep implementation details (like integer vs float vs double), when not strictly needed.
- fulafel 6y ago
  Schema systems (like spec and malli in the Clojure world) work well for checking states in data and are more powerful and ergonomic for that than type systems in mainstream languages.

Aperocky 6y ago

That's strongly dependent on how big the code base is. I'm a huge python fan, and I don't like/use IDEs on my personal projects. But eventually I still gravitated towards typescript because it had typing and the compiler + unit tests giving me a huge boost in ability to extend my project beyond a certain size. I think the threshold is around 50-100 files, but smaller code bases also benefits from the typing structure.

kaliszad 6y ago
At OrgPad, we are well over 100, maybe even 200 namespaces in Clojure and ClojureScript and I don't think we have any trouble keeping up. Most of the problems we have are frankly not in any capacity connected to Clojure or ClojureScript but rather half-baked, inconsistent technologies and their implementations like CSS, browser interoperability/ APIs mostly. The server-side (Clojure) is rather boring currently, so can't say much about that - most of the stuff seems to be just ok. There seems to be a lack of libraries for transforming image/ video formats in Java for the newer formats like WebP, AV1. Probably most people drop to imagemagick/ ffmpeg? That is kind of a problem, but not really pressing. We have lost much more time to CSS and bad browser APIs.

tiew9Vii 6y ago

> Types almost never save the day and they don't add much to the understanding. There’s a saying in strongly typed languages “make illegal states unrepresentable”. Java doesn’t let you get all the way there but it’s better than nothing. When you look at strongly typed languages with a good type system, often when you compile it just works. Besides hello world, I’ve never written program beyond a few lines that has just worked in a dynamic language. ...I do like clojure and the repl workflow and how everything is data. Haven’t done much besides play with it but have a friend who writes clojure professionally on a large codebase and their feedback is most of the errors they now see wouldn’t exist with a type system.

kaliszad 6y ago
Can you be more specific about your friends codebase? How large, what industry/ problem space? Of course, you can write bad/ unmaintainable code in any language. I have seen such code in Clojure(Script) as well. But some languages really encourage bad code where other languages already feel like you are doing something wrong when you write bad code. (e.g. Using many atoms in Clojure, doing boolean transformations etc. just from the top of my head.) Strongly typed languages in my experience don't help anything, make programming harder for everybody and the benefit is (for most software) questionable. Compilers should handle most types for us and only give us a hint something could be better, if we were more specific e.g. with a type hint. Humans should think about the problems not about deep implementation details (like integer vs float vs double), when not strictly needed.
fulafel 6y ago
Schema systems (like spec and malli in the Clojure world) work well for checking states in data and are more powerful and ergonomic for that than type systems in mainstream languages.