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Different static type systems offer different trade-offs, and most are far from perfect. If you ask people to adopt them then you are asking them to accept their failings in exchange for some some compelling super-powers, and a promise that they will be better in the future.
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((Hopefully last thread on the "Maybe Not" talk)) I'm seeing a lot of people object with the following argument: 1. Hickey has problem X with type system A 2. Type system B doesn't have X => Hickey is wrong about static typing. This is a really common, and IMO poor, argument.
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Personally I'm cool with the trade-off, but I've needed to make peace with the fact that there is no type system that will ever really satisfy me now. I'm optimistic that we are iterating towards a better place though. The future is exciting!
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Mhm. The weird thing is that in his talk Hickey clearly pointed to type systems that don't exhibit each of the problems he was complaining about. I.e. he was offering very constructive feedback about type system design. Type system folks should study that feedback!
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Yeah, I’ve always liked the RDL stuff in clojure/spec. I’ve often thought it would be cool to see structural type systems with namespaced field/type associations.
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No worries! Haven't seen much except for the Rich Hickey's gist about open source—seems somewhat sour but also understandable and possibly a bit of a hissy/hickey fit. I noticed your secret project in another tweet … so the future of programming _is_ dependently typed, isn't it?
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I'm pretty sure it is! But it's still a long road ahead. Many problems still need to be solved, and that's even with all the decades of research poured into it. I do think we need to try to get it into practical usage more though - hence my not-so-secret project :3
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