core.typed VS inspector

...and Typed Racket is a really powerful type system (see refinement types[4]). So, I thought it's just a matter of time for Clojure to get to that level of power and support. It should be much easier to do this to Clojure than to Ruby, given that you have a working example of how to do it well. So I'm really surprised Clojure isn't gradually typed by now, with most of the code being annotated and type-checked at compile time.

[1] https://github.com/clojure/core.typed

[2] https://github.com/typedclojure/typedclojure

[3] https://github.com/typedclojure/typedclojure/blob/main/examp...

[4] https://docs.racket-lang.org/ts-reference/Experimental_Featu...

gradual typing (spec/schema/malli) or actual type systems like https://github.com/clojure/core.typed . I don't use them too much though.

Do you know about the Typed Clojure project? More or less Racket's contract system, for Clojure:

https://github.com/clojure/core.typed

To me, it's one of the great testaments to the power of Lisp that you can bolt on a static type system after the fact.

There's also https://github.com/clojure/core.typed Typed Clojure

> show me an example of how having 'spec' is going to help me refactor the code that I got wrong the first time, as easily as what a proto-ML-like static type checker does. It's not a question of "types are bad vs types are good thing". It's a question of "this property was called 'name', but now I need it to be 'names', and I really need to know every possible place of my code base that uses it so that I can recursively change all code paths to handle the fact that it's a list, now." I read the spec doc a dozen times, and I don't think it does help in this simplest of simple case.

For this, I think the way to go is to use `fdef` to annotate the arguments to each function. This is a lot more explicit keyboard-typing on the programmer's part, but then so is a statically-typed language.

Where I think Clojure will still come up short is in tooling to support finding each reference in a better way than grepping your project for `:user/name`. All the information you need is in there, as you can see from this proof-of-concept tool[0], but it's not implemented seamlessly into the workflow.

[0]: https://github.com/clj-kondo/inspector

Hopefully specs are ending up in an s/fdef rather than a comment. Sadly no editor integration yet but I know /u/borkdude did some experiments looking at integrating this with clj-kondo here https://github.com/clj-kondo/inspector/. I'm not sure what the final verdict was for feasibility.