[banach]

If we focus only on the benefits, her are two basic but distinguishing features that make it a very pleasant and productive language in my experience: - knowing through the type systems that a function’s result depends only on its parameters makes testing more reliable - the syntax and type inference makes it possible to write down many algorithms extremely tersely, which is also helpful in getting the implementation right

[kadoban]

This also provides maintenance benefits. It's not _quite_ that if it compiles (after you make whatever change you wanted to) that it's correct, but it's not far off either.

[mooreds]

> but it's not far off either.

How "far "off" is it, in terms of correctness, compared to other, more conventional statically typed languages like C++ or Java or Rust?

[steeleduncan]

Sadly, there is not an obvious metric through which this can be answered, but the type system is much more advanced than that of C++ or Java, and as such you can be more precise about the inputs and outputs of a piece of code.

As long as take advantage of the type system, the compiler tends to permit far fewer programs that compile, but do the wrong thing, than is the case in C++/Java. You will notice you spend more time editing code to make it compile, and less time debugging code that does compile.

Rust should not be grouped with C++ or Java, as its type system is essentially that of Haskell with the addition of lifetimes. The developer experience is similar in that you tend to spend more time getting code to compile, and less time debugging.