Hell Is Other REPLs
&gt; The Rust or Haskell compilers, for example, insist on policing whatever private understanding you might have about the <i>meaning</i> of your code.<p>The thing about &quot;private understandings&quot; is that they&#x27;re just another way of saying &quot;we expect ceaseless, flawless vigilance&quot; (as one writer put it), not to mention &quot;flawless communication and training.&quot;<p>Languages which impose weird restrictions tend to do so because it allows them to offer (nearly) ironclad guarantees about something else.<p>There are certain programming idioms that work brilliantly in Haskell. Those same idioms would be utterly miserable in the presence of unrestricted mutation.<p>Or to take the author&#x27;s other example, Rust forbids shared mutable state, and it keeps careful track of ownership. But I can freely use native CPU threads without worrying about anything worse than a deadlock, and I can bang directly on raw bytes without worrying about anything worse than a controlled runtime failure. And this remains true even if team communication occasionally fails or if someone makes a mistake.<p>Sometimes I want to rule out entire classes of potentially dangerous mistakes, and not just have a &quot;private understanding&quot; that nobody will ever make certain mistakes.<p>As always, it&#x27;s a matter of using the right tool for the job. If you need to write a high-performance, heavily-threaded network server that parses malicious binary data, Rust is a great tool <i>because</i> of those restrictions. If you need to do highly exploratory programming and invent new idioms to talk about your problem domain, Common Lisp is awesome. And if you need to build libraries where everything has a rigid mathematical structure, Haskell is a great tool.<p>In my experience, Commony Lisp is a <i>deeply</i> opinionated language, and its most dramatic opinion is that &quot;your code and your data should have identical representations and structures.&quot; And for the right problem, that restriction is extremely powerful.