coalton VS clog

It's still… not the same. In CL (and specially with SBCL), we get compile time (type) errors and warnings at the blink of an eye, when we compile a single function with a keystroke (typically C-c C-c in Slime).

And there's also been improvement, see Coalton for a ML on top of CL. (https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/)

For the parenthetically inclined among us, there's also an implementation in Coalton: <https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/tree/main/examples/t...>

Common Lisp has bad marketing (even OCaml has Twitch streamers and "influencers" now), and bad support for general editors, both of which make it a non-starter for most curious people who have an afternoon to try something. But behind all that is magnificent activity for those who got over the initial potential energy barrier. Just to give some examples:

1. SBCL, the most popular open source implementation of Lisp, is seeing potentially two new garbage collectors. One of them is a parallel collector written by a university student (!!) which blows my mind.

2. SBCL has better and better support for deploying Liwp as a C-compatible shared library, using SBCL-LIBRARIAN. It makes it play nicer with other applications in C and Python.

3. Coalton is another exciting development that allows a Haskell type system and "Lisp-1" functional programming in Common Lisp. That means type classes (or traits), something Lisp hasn't really had a proper notion of, and full type inference. Persistent sequences based off of RRB-trees were recently merged, and interestingly, they're implemented purely in Coalton [1]. That means Clojure-like seqs.

It's interesting to see users of Lisp generating the above ideas and libraries, not a special in-group of committees, "official" developers, etc.

[1] https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/blob/main/library/se...

Use an editor that auto-inserts parens and that indents the code correctly. Now nothing bad can happen. And the parens are used to edit code structurally.

re typing: Coalton brings Haskell-like typing on top of CL. https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/ Other lisps are typed: typed racket, Carp… and btw, SBCL's compiler brings some welcome type warnings and errors (unlike Python, for instance).

If you like type safety, this project would be perfect for using https://coalton-lang.github.io/ so your REPL supported Common Lisp out of the gate.

Agree that you can use types to express and prove logical properties via compiler; it can be a fun way to solve a problem though too much of it tends to frustrate coworkers. It's also not exactly "low cost"; here's an old quip I have in my quotes file:

"With Scala you feel smart having just got something to work in a beautiful way but when you look around the room to tell your clojure colleague how clever you are, you notice he left 3 hours ago and there is a post-it saying use a Map." --Daniel Worthington-Bodart

> On the contrary, they're still the most effective technique we've found for improving program correctness at low cost.

This is not borne out by research, such as there is any of any quality: https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ The best intervention to improve correctness, if not already being done, is code review: https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1120495752969641986 This doesn't necessarily mean dynamic types are better, just that if static types are better, they aren't tremendously so to obviously show in studies, unlike code review benefit studies.

My own bias is in favor of dynamic types, though I think the way Common Lisp does it is a lot better than Python (plus Lisp is flexible enough in other ways to let static type enthusiasts have their cake and eat it too https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton), and Python better than PHP, and PHP better than JS. Just like not all static type systems are C, not all dynamic type systems are JS. Untyped langs like assembly or Forth are interesting but I don't have enough experience.

I don't find the argument that valuable though, since I think just focusing on dynamic vs static is one of the least interesting division points when comparing languages or practices, and if we're trading experience takes I think Clojure's immutable-by-default prevents more bugs than any statically typed language that is mutable by default. It's not exactly a low cost intervention though, and when you really need to optimize you'll be encouraged by the profiler to replace some things with Java native arrays and so on. I don't think changing to static types would make a quality difference (especially when things like spec exist to get many of the same or more benefits) and would also not be a low cost intervention.

Last quip to reflect on. "What's true of every bug found in the field? ... It passed the type checker. ... It passed all the tests. Okay. So now what do you do? Right? I think we're in this world I'd like to call guardrail programming. Right? It's really sad. We're like: I can make change because I have tests. Who does that? Who drives their car around banging against the guardrail saying, "Whoa! I'm glad I've got these guardrails because I'd never make it to the show on time."" --Rich Hickey (https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/)

Coalton seems great, I love the idea. This issue seems problematic, though: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/issues/84

> Lisps can be very flexible, but they usually lack static type safety, opening a wide and horrible door to run-time errors.

People should do basic research before writing something silly like this. Qualifying your statement with 'usually' is just a chicken sh*t approach. Common Lisp and Racket have optional strong typing, leaving the responsibility and choice to the developer. Common Lisp is great for implementing compilers. You also have thing like Typed Racket and Coalton. The latter is comletely statically typed ala MLTON

https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton

Have you checked out Coalton? It allows static typing a la Haskell within Common Lisp. Fully interoperable with CL, including through SLIME etc.

I've not regretted using Common Lisp for large, professional projects. However, I started Coalton so that some parts of a Common Lisp project can have strong, static, strict types—reaping benefits of compile-time errors and increased efficiency when I need it, without having to rewrite everything.

Reminds me of the approach of CLOG (Common Lisp Omnificent Gui[1]) and its ancestor GNOGA (The GNU Omnificent GUI for Ada[2]).

They also integrate basic components and even graphical UI editor (at least for CLOG), so you can essentially develop the whole thing from inside CL or Ada

[1] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

[2] https://github.com/alire-project/gnoga

For me David Botton [0] with his work including code, support and videos is doing very nice work in this direction.

I use SBCL for everything but work because I cannot get; we are getting there, but like you say, it’s such a nice experience working interactively building fast that it is magic and it’s painful returning to my daily work of Python and typescript/react. It feels like a waste of time/life, really.

[0] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

I was following along on the Windows page and didn't check back on the main README to see if any of the other instructions would help.

It the answer is "latter", then you could look at Common Lisp and Reblocks (https://40ants.com/reblocks/) or CLOG (https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog).

I haven't used Clojure professionally in 10 years so with a grain of salt here are my thoughts as only one other person answered...

CL over Clojure: it's the OG Lisp that the creator of Clojure used and wanted to continue using but faced too much resistance from management afraid of anything not-Java/not-Oracle, or not-CLR/not-Microsoft, etc. Clojure shipped originally as "just another jar" so devs could "sneak" it in. If you don't have such a management restriction, why Clojure? If you want to integrate CL with the JVM, you can use the ABCL implementation, there's also something from one of the proprietary Lisps. Some useful CL features that are nice in this domain: conditions and restarts mentioned in a sibling comment (very nice to help interactively develop/debug e.g. a selenium webdriver test), ability to easily compile an exe (perhaps useful for microservices, or just to keep your deployment environment clean and not having to care about Lisp), and ability to easily ship with an open local socket allowing you to SSH in (or SSH port forward) and debug/fix/poke around in production (JVM of course lets you attach debuggers to a running process, even certain billion+ dollar companies will have supervised/limited prod debugging sessions for various hairy cases, but it's not as interactive). You should never hear CL advocates claim you can't scale to large teams/groups of engineers or large multi-million-lines sized projects, though you might oddly hear Clojure advocates sometimes claim you can't (and shouldn't) scale to such large projects -- large groups of engineers are a non-issue for them as well though, the challenge is in hiring, not in the language somehow making it impossible to modularize and keep people from stepping on each other.

Clojure over CL: its integration with the JVM is nicer than ABCL's, so if you do actually want a lot of the great world of Java stuff, it's easier to get at. Database integration libraries are better. Access to libs (Clojure or Java) is via Maven, so it's a larger ecosystem with more self-integrating components (especially around monitoring/metrics) than what's available for Lisp via Quicklisp. Clojure is very opinionated, much of it quite tasteful, and that gives the whole ecosystem a certain consistency. (You can have immutable data structures in CL, you can if you want use [] for literal vectors and make them syntactically important e.g. in let bindings, but not everyone will be on board.) Even though its popularity seems to have stopped growing, at least at the same rate as e.g. Go which it was keeping pace with for a while, it's still popular enough with a bigger community; as a proxy measure there are multiple conferences around the world and good talks at adjacent conferences, whereas Lisp mostly just has one conference in Europe per year and only occasional branching outside of that.

If you're doing a client-side-heavy webapp, ClojureScript is still amazing, CL's answers there aren't very compelling with the exception of CLOG (https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog) which takes an entirely different direction than the usual idea of translating/running Lisp on top of JavaScript and its popular frameworks.