You can have both. This is the beauty of lisp - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity But in all seriousness

You can have both. This is the beauty of lisp - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity But in all seriousness you can gain reflection without a runtime. Just expose the types as data. Seems foolish to not do something like this. Particularly when you look at the lengths so many devs have gone to try and replicate it.