4 ms·

Both static typing and immutability are trade-offs and we need to know when its appropriate to make them. I get concurrency for the price of immutability in clo

• jerf 17y ago
  Paul Graham often talks about the partial ordering of language goodness, but doesn't know what beats Lisp. Possibly still nothing does, but this provides the way to give concrete examples: Since no one language can choose all invariants, it is likely that over time certain invariants will come to be seen as better in some niches than others, so there will indeed be several "winners" at the top of the ordering based on different choice of invariants. Lisp will still be one of them, the choice of no invariants that restrict the programmer. It's a viable niche. It just isn't the only niche. I think it's less viable than Lisp advocates think and that this is part of the reason it never has taken off, but here we enter the realm of opinion as there isn't anywhere near enough science to actually know. (Indeed, the whole of idea of "science" sounds weird here because we are so far away from having it at all.) I also point to foldr's message in this thread. Strong typing has its pros and cons, even when done as nicely as Haskell's typing can be, and personally, I don't think that's ever going to change. Sometimes you're going to want it and sometimes not.