A Year in Clojure
> "With function specs, I could assert the inputs and outputs to specific functions at runtime; not quite as reassuring as compile-time but better than nothing!"For 10 years I've seen many developers who have only really used statically typed languages like C++ and Java, now finding the "joy" of dynamically typed languages and all the "freedom" they give you, only to realize within a year or two that, wait a second, verifying those types at compile-time was actually pretty useful. I've also seen mass migrations away from languages like Ruby, Python and Clojure towards OCaml, Haskell, and F#, because people really enjoyed the functional programming aspects but wanted their static typing back. After writing the 10,000th unit test that only exists to ensure that you spelled some function/method/hash-key correctly, it gets a little tiresome. Personally I've settled on TypeScript, which has nice IDE integration in VS Code so that it validates your types live while you code, while still giving you the flexibility of a dynamically typed language (it's all still JS at the end of the day).