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Is Typed Clojure worth the trouble?

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Re: Is Typed Clojure worth the trouble?

#3

Type checkers are an automated solution for the problem of not having good teammates. If you don't have that problem you won't benefit that much from type checking and might have many other huge advantages.

That's nonsense frankly. I've worked with an excellent team of Haskellers before I don't think we'd have been anywhere near as good without the type system. I'd agree that having an awesome team gives you a lot of other advantages, and actually FP is a huge opportunity to build that team for start ups. FP tends to attract the kind of people who make up a great team. It's for this reason that I think the conclusions of the flub paradox article are wrong http://steved-imaginaryreal.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-flub-...

Re: Is Typed Clojure worth the trouble?

#4

Type checkers are an automated solution for the problem of not having good teammates. If you don't have that problem you won't benefit that much from type checking and might have many other huge advantages.

that is static typing FUD. if it takes you a few days or weeks to learn to use the type checker and it saves you from expensive runtime errors later, then whats the problem?

Re: Is Typed Clojure worth the trouble?

#5

Type checkers are an automated solution for the problem of not having good teammates. If you don't have that problem you won't benefit that much from type checking and might have many other huge advantages.

Even the smartest teammates in the world won't protect a program from that idiot who wrote all the code in my personal projects. Good type systems minimise the damage that he can do.

Re: Is Typed Clojure worth the trouble?

#6

Type checkers are an automated solution for the problem of not having good teammates. If you don't have that problem you won't benefit that much from type checking and might have many other huge advantages.

I don't think you understand the benefits of type checkers. Here are some:

- Catching at compile time errors that would otherwise happen at runtime

- Performance

- Occasionally, it can enable making your code mathematically, provably correct

- Maintainability and flexibility in the sense that the code is easier to read by future hires

- And the most important advantage of all: automatic refactorings. Without that, the code base rots because developers are afraid to refactor since doing this without errors on a dynamically typed language requires a lot of tests, which nobody really has. Even renaming a function cannot be done safely in a dynamically typed language and it requires the oversight of a human

Re: Is Typed Clojure worth the trouble?

#7

Type checkers are an automated solution for the problem of not having good teammates. If you don't have that problem you won't benefit that much from type checking and might have many other huge advantages.

As much as I love dynamic languages, I have to disagree friend. :( Static typing confers more benefits than just enforcing a self-documenting type check on your code. It adds a level of expressiveness about datatypes to match the expressiveness of the algorithm itself. This is especially true in languages like SML or Haskell where the type system lets you describe the data you're working with in a pretty precise way.

Dynamic langs have lots of good qualities to them, but every tool has a drawback. Tests, documentation, good team dynamic, etc. hedge against some of the disadvantages of a dynamic language. They aren't a panacea.

Re: Is Typed Clojure worth the trouble?

#8

Type checkers are an automated solution for the problem of not having good teammates. If you don't have that problem you won't benefit that much from type checking and might have many other huge advantages.

Type checkers are an automated solution for having a human brain.

Re: Is Typed Clojure worth the trouble?

#9

Type checkers are an automated solution for the problem of not having good teammates. If you don't have that problem you won't benefit that much from type checking and might have many other huge advantages.

Just like hand-washing is for doctors who aren't cleanly people.

Re: Is Typed Clojure worth the trouble?

#10
post #4

Type checkers are an automated solution for the problem of not having good teammates. If you don't have that problem you won't benefit that much from type checking and might have many other huge advantages.

that is static typing FUD. if it takes you a few days or weeks to learn to use the type checker and it saves you from expensive runtime errors later, then whats the problem?

The problem is the overhead in adding typing. The time taken to learn the type system is a one-off but static typing has running costs in slowing down development, discouraging exploratory programming, extra cognitive load in reasoning about the type system, and "false positives" in disallowing otherwise correct programs. It does nearly eliminate a class of bugs - this is wonderful, but the bugs it does eliminate tend to be ones that are fairly obvious to find.
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