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Well, a considerable number of people in the Clojure programming community are often people, who developed in Java or C++ for one or two decades and sometimes p

Well, a considerable number of people in the Clojure programming community are often people, who developed in Java or C++ for one or two decades and sometimes people how have to switch between several languages. Most that I have talked to love Clojure above all else and can see the things not contributing to the solution of the problem at hand. Static types are at the top of the list of things that contribute almost nil and cause a huge amount of development overhead everywhere. It sometimes seems in these advanced languages, static types are there so the programmer makes the job of a compiler (easier) or that you can write an academic paper, where static typing is almost a must to get it into a journal for some reason. My colleague gave a really in depth talk/ Q&A about Clojure and touched on static types at length. I think, it could be interesting for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UoIfeb31UU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UoIfeb31UU

throwaway894345 5y ago
> who developed in Java or C++ for one or two decades Right, this is exactly my point. People think these languages (especially as they were a decade or two ago) are representative of statically typed languages. > Static types are at the top of the list of things that contribute almost nil and cause a huge amount of development overhead everywhere. This is your dogma, not an established fact. I'm glad you like Closure; no doubt it's a fun, useful language. It's probably even better than Java or C++ for many things. I'm only saying if you try different languages you might see that there are tradeoffs in features. You might still think Closure is the best, but you might at least understand why people appreciate static types.
- kaliszad 5y ago
  I have written some Haskell and I am quite certain, it is more practical for me to use Clojure. I know other people, who did compiler research (! see my points above about academic research) who rewrote the previous more or less exploratory Clojure solution in Haskell for better performance and other positive aspects. These are all good things. I also know about Facebook, Microsoft and other big companies using Haskell to great advantage. But the compiler e.g. is not something commercially applicable it is research, they don't have or want to sell it or make it a service. I also am not sure anybody would be interested to buy it, as they never told us about any practically applicable results (e.g. better parallelized HPC code) which was kind of the point of the research. I might be mistaken though. Anyway, the lecture and the exercises where rather good and even if it was the only thing that semester, it would justify the semester at the university for me.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    > I have written some Haskell and I am quite certain, it is more practical for me to use Clojure. Certainly, but there are lots of factors beyond static types vs dynamic types. For real world projects, I might similarly use Python or JavaScript over Haskell because it will be easier to find developers, libraries, and tooling. That doesn't impugn static types, however (on the other hand, depending on the project, Haskell might be the better tool). Indeed, the type system is a relatively small, overemphasized facet of any programming language. See my comment here for elaboration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27784762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27784762

throwaway894345 5y ago

> who developed in Java or C++ for one or two decades Right, this is exactly my point. People think these languages (especially as they were a decade or two ago) are representative of statically typed languages. > Static types are at the top of the list of things that contribute almost nil and cause a huge amount of development overhead everywhere. This is your dogma, not an established fact. I'm glad you like Closure; no doubt it's a fun, useful language. It's probably even better than Java or C++ for many things. I'm only saying if you try different languages you might see that there are tradeoffs in features. You might still think Closure is the best, but you might at least understand why people appreciate static types.

kaliszad 5y ago
I have written some Haskell and I am quite certain, it is more practical for me to use Clojure. I know other people, who did compiler research (! see my points above about academic research) who rewrote the previous more or less exploratory Clojure solution in Haskell for better performance and other positive aspects. These are all good things. I also know about Facebook, Microsoft and other big companies using Haskell to great advantage. But the compiler e.g. is not something commercially applicable it is research, they don't have or want to sell it or make it a service. I also am not sure anybody would be interested to buy it, as they never told us about any practically applicable results (e.g. better parallelized HPC code) which was kind of the point of the research. I might be mistaken though. Anyway, the lecture and the exercises where rather good and even if it was the only thing that semester, it would justify the semester at the university for me.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > I have written some Haskell and I am quite certain, it is more practical for me to use Clojure. Certainly, but there are lots of factors beyond static types vs dynamic types. For real world projects, I might similarly use Python or JavaScript over Haskell because it will be easier to find developers, libraries, and tooling. That doesn't impugn static types, however (on the other hand, depending on the project, Haskell might be the better tool). Indeed, the type system is a relatively small, overemphasized facet of any programming language. See my comment here for elaboration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27784762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27784762