Comment by oelang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oelang | Hacker News Reader

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We've had dynamic OO+FP languages for a very long time but only in the last 10 years have we seen them with static type systems. I really like clojure (though I haven't used it in anger) but I think you're wrong when it comes to complexity.

Complexity with dynamic languages grows with the size of the project. I know that because of the focus on purity & immutable data structures clojure mananges to mitigate this problem but I'm afraid it's still there.

The last few years several features have been added to clojure that increased the complexity(/surface area) of the language and the documentation is often a mess. I'm not a clojure hater, just pointing out that the complexity with clojure lies elsewhere.

edit: kinda forgot about Ocaml (~18 yrs old apparently)

> Complexity with dynamic languages grows with the size of the project.

I was talking about language complexity, not how complex the project is.

That said, I have nothing against static typing, my argument was not really about typing at all. It was more about how OO and functional interact in clojure compared to java. Also types by itself dont really make all that good of a documentation, at least not the kind you care about when looking something up in the internet.

I am a fan of schema, and I think the future really is in the combination of schema and core.typed. I dont really like to devlop with pre set types and structures, but you could with schema/core.typed. I prefer to work dynamiclly and once im happy with the shape of my data, I 'set it in stone' by writing the correct schema for it. Then you can just always validate everything during devlopment/staticlly. When you deploy you can turn on validation only for data from the outside. This is how I would like to do it, until schema and core.typed work together I just use schema.

There's nothing preventing you from using core.typed (http://typedclojure.org/) in Clojure. There's a presentation from CircleCI on how they use core.typed (http://blog.circleci.com/supporting-typed-clojure/) where it makes sense for their projects.

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