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Comment by srott | Hacker News Reader

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srott·

Or you could use Shen and spend less time philosophizing

http://www.shenlanguage.org/

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Could you elaborate? What about shen makes you say this?

Shen is like C++ in that it's bolted on top of a less typeful language (except this time it's Common Lisp, rather than C), and is "type safe" as long as you don't deliberately use a number of escape hatches.

That's wrong in just about every respect.

Shen is a PLATFORM INDEPENDANT (not clisp based) language with an emphasis upon functionalism, a novel and very powerful type system based on sequent calculus, and OPTIONAL type checking, IF you want it. It is platform independant because it is built upon an incredibly simple lisp that you can build an interpreter for on top of almost any platform, so long as you can guarantee TCO.

It really is lisp flavored haskell.

The point to type checking is protecting abstractions, and it being "optional" reduces its value to zero.

Wrong. Sometimes type checking is uneeded. In addition it can make prototyping easy: Write the code, add the annotations later. Of course, you need some discipline to make it work, but of what good practice isn't that true?

And if you really hate it, just type (tc +) at the start of your code. Magic!

I just wanted to point out that it's more comparison of imperative vs functional languages than Lisp and Haskell.

Shen is a Lisp with "Haskell philosophy".

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