“Types trump macros” is a nice way to put it. Macros are amazing for creating new languages, but a good type system with strong case matching and sum types is just incredible to work with.
Halfway though I realized I was inventing a shittier Purescript.
Dsls are mostly masturbation. Custom syntax? Custom evaluation semantics? I always regret it after like cocaine.
The only thing macros are reasonable for is custom bindings.
Most people are not qualified to invent dsls. Myself included. And the people who are qualified don't need "language oriented programming" ala racket. They can spin up a lexer which is the least complicated part of the task anyway.
As for types, they have a HUGE power to weight ratio. All of my efficiency gains in Clojure due to macros were forfeited 10x over hunting down null pointer exceptions at runtime.
I still love Racket. And I still prototype in Clojure. But Haskell brings you closer to math. Closer to category theory.
Most programmers don't need new symbols and semantics. They need a deeper understanding of combinatorial logic.
Racket allows people with new ideas to prototype them efficiently by easily implementing a compiler that would've been an interpreter otherwise.
As I said, I like Racket. And I agree with you it's a nice environment for playing with new language ideas. But most of those ideas are bad and are just incidental complexity. And the 1 of 100 languages that are great ideas and needed by the world are better off spun out with their own parser and toolchain without being so tied to Dr Racket and Chez Scheme.
That seems mostly a fault of the JVM, no?
Clojure's nil punning and Java's Null Pointers are an unholy alliance here.
But a type system like Elm solves the problem before it ever gets to JavaScript for example.