Clojure is built on dynamic typing. This is pain. I wrote enough Python (pre-mypy), Javascript, and elisp to say this. Past certain size a dynamically typed codebase becomes needlessly hard to wrangle because of that. Hence the success of Python type annotations and Typescript.

Instead, the world should have seen the light of Hindley-Milner type systems, ML-inspired languages, immutability, or at least not sharing mutable state. Did Haskell fail? Hmm, let's look at Typescript and Rust.

Don't get me wrong, a Lisp is always a great and fun language, and you can write whatever DSL you might like on top of it. But the old joke that "a Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, and the cost of nothing" still has quite a bit of truth to it.

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slifin 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Plenty of ways to define complex data shapes in Clojure

Spec is definitely underrated here considering it's built into the language and has a wider scope but for most people they want the intellisense experience which you can get with clj-kondo + mailli but is not built in so most teams don't use it, fair enough

I'd like to move the goal posts though and say I want flowstorm in every (any other?!) language

I can just run the program and scrub backwards and forwards through the execution and look at all the immutable values frame by frame with a high level UI with plenty of search/autocomplete options

For program understanding there's nothing better

The fact I can program against the timeline of values of my program and create custom UI on top is crazy

One of the most mind blowing demos to me was Bret Victor's inventing on principle and having a programmable reverse debugger for your language makes those demos viable

I built an emulator recently for work that replays what happens on live locally, combined with flowstorm I can go line by line and tell you exactly what happened and why, no print statements no reruns with my own custom UI customised to our apps interesting parts

This is my appeal to anyone outside of Clojure please build flowstorm for JavaScript and or Python

The design of flowstorm is definitely helped by the fact that 95% of Clojure programs are immutable but I don't think it's impossible to replicate just very difficult

	▲	nine_k 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This indeed is one of the superpowers. I hope Elixir will eventually acquire it.

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andersmurphy 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The big difference is Clojure is immutable by default.

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wrs 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

On the other hand, it would be easier to add type checking to a Lisp than it was to Python or JavaScript, and I don’t know any technical reason you couldn’t. A little Googling shows it’s been experimented with several times.

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nine_k 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, Typed Clojure is a thing!

But the real strength of Lisp is in the macros, the metaprogramming system. And I suspect that typing most macros properly would be a bit less trivial than even typing of complex generic types, like lenses. Not typing a macro, and only typechecking the macroexpansion would formally work, but, usability-wise, could be on par with C++ template error reporting.

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wrs 6 hours ago | parent [-]

My point was that you could implement type checking with macros, not that you could type check macros. (Though that would be cool!) As opposed to having to change the language definition first (Python) or implement an entirely new compiler (TypeScript).

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nine_k 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Certainly you can implement the typechecker with macros, but it should also work on macros, before expansion. That is, you likely want (-> ...) typechecked as written, not (only) as expanded, and typing errors reported on the non-expanded form.

	▲	andersmurphy 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right the same way the type checker should check the type checker.

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teaearlgraycold 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That means little to a programmer unless they really want to spend thousands of hours building a type checker before starting a project.

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wrs 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Talk about moving the goalposts! Did you implement TypeScript yourself before using it?

	▲	teaearlgraycold 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The parent comment implies that the tool does not exist yet.