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krn | 2 years ago

I believe that many people from Ruby on Rails and Django communities moved on to Clojure, Elixir, and Kotlin.

Others chose between Rust and Go, if performance was the most important thing.

The thing about dynamically typed languages and their expressiveness, is that you are sacrificing the ease of long-term maintenance for the ease of short-term prototyping.

Personally, I am a big fan of Clojure as a tool for designing software, but I would prefer having to maintain a code base written in Rust.

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fulafel|2 years ago

Even the maintainability argument is suspect I think: Static type systems as commonly used are not very powerful compared with schema validation style approaches used in the dynamic languages world (eg malli or spec in Clojure world). Static types lose in expressiveness, flexibility of when & where they are enforced, and ability to pass around the data shape specifications as data.

edit: and tangentially, the building and iterating lifecycle phase is of course usually the make-or-break bottleneck - maintenance phase sw engineering is comparatively a "happy problem".

krn|2 years ago

That's true, and Clojure (when used with metosin/malli) is probably the only reasonable alternative to statically typed programming languages in terms of long-term maintainability.

Essentially, it's like two completely different reasoning models: inside-the-box (ALGOL / SQL), and outside-the-box (LISP / Datalog).

The first model (ALGOL / SQL) is about designing for machines to better understand, and the second model (LISP / Datalog) is about designing for humans to better understand.

I think that the main issue with dynamically typed programming languages is the lack of robust enforcement.

kaba0|2 years ago

I believe it is a lost fight, but why have Rust and Go become a collocation?! It’s as faulty as C++ and JS.

krn|2 years ago

Go becomes an answer when one is willing to trade the correctness of Rust for a garbage collector and a bullet-proof standard library.