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I'm a big fan of lisps, and haven't played sufficiently with rust to have an opinion -- but I will note that the benefits of a sophisticated type system is qualitatively different from, say, the statically-typed environment of C or Objective-C. The comparison I make when thinking about CL is something like Haskell or Elm, which /do/ have that feel of "if it compiles, it works". Without that, I do have the feeling of working without a safety-net that pushes against that sense of freedom that dynamically-typed languages like CL otherwise offer.

(Obligatory mention here of Coalton, which is an experiment in creating that sense of security within a CL paradigm: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton )




The sense of security is provided by a good test suite (which you still need) plus SBCL type annotations.


I've never managed to achieve that (the comparable sense of security), which may be on me.

Out of interest, have you worked in one of these typed languages -- Haskell, Elm, maybe OCaml (haven't tried it), Idris, Rust? I think they feel very different in this axis compared to C/C++/Objective-C/Java. Not necessarily better (I am still reminded of the term "bondage-and-discipline language" from the Jargon File[1]), but different.

[1]: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bondage-and-discipline-lan...




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