web-development-with-clojure VS deprecated-coalton-prototype

I actually did build something basic following the book Web Development With Clojure (https://github.com/jumarko/web-development-with-clojure), but honestly the way the code snippets were presented in the book were sometimes difficult to use if trying to follow along and build it yourself.

I think you could probably get code from different chapters from their git repo, but then you're not doing it yourself - you are instead trying to read diffs to understand what's new and figure out why it has been changed.

My experience has been that there is no complete guide, tutorial, or example that is kept current and provides every detail such that you can follow it and learn. I'm sure with enough concerted effort, one obviously can learn it... but there will be some trial and error and some guesswork. Normally that's fine, but it slows the process compared to other tech stacks and their guides.

The Clojure community is nice and helpful, but they're all busy doing real work (rather than teaching). Even the book I mentioned is not yet complete and has been in progress for over two years I think.

can't jerk

I used to use CL quite a bit, but have since abandoned it for Haskell, so I'm a bit biased.

There's a number of issues with that:

- I'd be missing all the optimizations that can be performed due to purity.

- There's more to Haskell's type system than just vanilla Hindley-Milner, and the implementation of it isn't particularly trivial. https://github.com/stylewarning/coalton is the closest thing and it's still missing a large amount of the type system.

- Doing the implementation would be a significant amount of work to get it to integrate well with the language, and it would be a layer tightly glued on top instead of integrated with the language.

- A major part of Haskell is the standard library, a good chunk of the semantics of Haskell people use on a day to day basis, like monads and etc, are a part of the standard library.

This looks like something Common Lisp does better, however I have too little Clojure experience to compare. CL (and SBCL in particular) does "good enough" static type checks, it throws warning at compile time (when we compile one function with a keystroke). We can also precise our function types gradually. It isn't a HM type system (Coalton[1] could be it) but it's already great (compared to no compile-time types at all).

Oh, about interactive development: that's sure, CL shines here. Objects get updated (lazily) after a class change, we can install Quicklisp libraries without restarting the image, etc. It's very smooth.

1: https://github.com/stylewarning/coalton

Help out with Coalton.

If you like this kind of stuff, maybe you can help implement type classes in Coalton.

(there's a work-in-progress library to add a dialect of ML on top of CL: coalton)