Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by reikonomusha 1544 days ago
> Lisp is not type safe.

It is type safe. While Lisp is not statically typed, its typing discipline is strong: operations performed on incompatible types signal recoverable errors.

1 comments

Crashing at runtime, recoverable or not, is usually not what people mean when they say type safe. Spare me the static vs strong academia. Type safe when spoken, in practical every day terms, normally means enforced at compile time with IDE autocompletion support, usually implying static typing.
It's not crashing at runtime, it's crashing at compile time. Or rather, a purely REPL-focused language like Lisp dispenses with the phase separation between compile- and run-time altogether. But then this applies just as much to dependently-typed languages, which come from the "compile time type safety" line of research. You can't be okay with those while dismissing Lisp.
Recoverable error handling at runtime is usually not what people mean when they say crashing.