Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tormeh 3676 days ago
The problem with Lisps is that generally speaking, they're all interpeted, which means type errors are discovered at runtime. Which sucks for maintenance.
2 comments

Most implementations of Common Lisp have ahead of time compilation, at least as an option, but also have the compiler, or sometimes a different compiler or an interpreter available at runtime. Clojure is also typically AOT-compiled to JVM bytecode.

Did you mean that Lisps are dynamically-typed? That's true, and whether it's mostly good or mostly bad is a religious topic that almost certainly lacks one true answer. My own take on it is that I program very interactively and static typing feels like an impediment to that most of the time. Furthermore, type errors are usually a small subset of the possible errors and many static type systems allow any type to be null anyway, drastically reducing the benefit.

Common Lisp is compiled and has a type system.

Several type systems.