alt Hacker NewsWell, Typed Clojure is a thing!
But the real strength of Lisp is in the macros, the metaprogramming system. And I suspect that typing most macros properly would be a bit less trivial than even typing of complex generic types, like lenses. Not typing a macro, and only typechecking the macroexpansion would formally work, but, usability-wise, could be on par with C++ template error reporting.
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wrs • 12/07/2025
My point was that you could implement type checking with macros, not that you could type check macros. (Though that would be cool!) As opposed to having to change the language definition first (Python) or implement an entirely new compiler (TypeScript).
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> Well, Typed Clojure is a thing!
I think we (the Clojure community) quickly figured out we don't really want static typing, which is a bit evident by the low uptake of Typed Clojure.
Personally I found it to A) make it a hassle for downstream consumers since your design is suddenly impacting others, because you can "lock things down" and B) have that very same effect on your own codebase, where it becomes a lot less flexible where it needs to be flexible.
Nowadays, I just use another language if I want static types, which happens sometimes but not nearly as often to say that dynamically typed languages are "dead" or whatever.