Dueling Rhetoric of Clojure and Haskell
The dueling rhetoric is the same rhetoric that has been around for decades: Some people really feel type systems add value; others, feel it&#x27;s a ball and chain. So which is it? The answer is probably &quot;yes.&quot; We should all believe by now since history has proven this correct. Most of the time you start with no type system for speed. Then you start adding weird checks and hacks (here&#x27;s lookin&#x27; at you clojure.spec). Then you rewrite with a type system.<p>I&#x27;m a devout Clojure developer. I think it delivers on the promises he outlines in his talk, but I also have no small appreciation for Haskell as an outrageously powerful language. Everyone robs from Haskell for their new shiny language, as they should. Unfortunately, not a night goes by where I don&#x27;t ask God to make me smart enough to understand how a statement like &quot;a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors&quot; can radically change how I implement marginably scalable applications that serve up JSON over REST. Clojure talks to me as if I were a child.<p>Rich Hickey is selling the case for Clojure, like any person who wants his or her language used should do. His arguments are mostly rational, but also a question of taste, which I feel is admitted. As for this writer, I&#x27;m glad he ends it by saying it isn&#x27;t a flame war. If I had to go to war alongside another group of devs, it would almost certainly be Haskell devs.