Dueling Rhetoric of Clojure and Haskell

> Much of the rhetoric that is currently flying around is a false dichotomy.

The author here is missing the rhetoric. The rhetoric is not about the programming language but about how we should be doing information processing. Except that the author isn't missing that point:

> In Haskell we typically “concrete” data with record types, but we don’t have to.

Great. That is the dichotomy. And it's not a "false" one. This is the question: should we be "concreting"? That's the whole dichotomy/point that is being made. By encoding EDN/Clojure in Haskell the author has gone through a cute intellectual puzzle but hasn't contributed to the crux of the discussion. (Indeed, he's tried to dismiss it as "false".)

The ergonomics that he ends up with are fairly lean (at least in the examples he's shown), though the Clojure expressions are a little leaner. But that's probably because Clojure has actually taken a stance/belief/opinion on the very real question/dichotomy at hand.

There are a number of row type libraries and a proposed extension: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Plugins/TypeChecker/Ro...

The dueling rhetoric is the same rhetoric that has been around for decades: Some people really feel type systems add value; others, feel it's a ball and chain. So which is it? The answer is probably "yes." We should all believe by now since history has proven this correct. Most of the time you start with no type system for speed. Then you start adding weird checks and hacks (here's lookin' at you clojure.spec). Then you rewrite with a type system.

I'm a devout Clojure developer. I think it delivers on the promises he outlines in his talk, but I also have no small appreciation for Haskell as an outrageously powerful language. Everyone robs from Haskell for their new shiny language, as they should. Unfortunately, not a night goes by where I don't ask God to make me smart enough to understand how a statement like "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" can radically change how I implement marginably scalable applications that serve up JSON over REST. Clojure talks to me as if I were a child.

Rich Hickey is selling the case for Clojure, like any person who wants his or her language used should do. His arguments are mostly rational, but also a question of taste, which I feel is admitted. As for this writer, I'm glad he ends it by saying it isn't a flame war. If I had to go to war alongside another group of devs, it would almost certainly be Haskell devs.

The fact that Haskell is smarter than me is exactly why I have been keeping at it!

There is no fun left if you know all the overarching principles of a language, and you realize it still doesn't solve your problem. This happened to me when learning Python, this is also why I don't really look at Go or Rust. They're good languages, I might use them at a workplace someday, but you can get to the end of their semantics, but be still left with the feeling that it's not enough.

(EDIT: minor wording improvement)

I am unconvinced of the practical utility of what row types give you for the added complexity.

The proposal to remove the Eff type (going back to IO) from purescript is telling