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by ducktective 637 days ago
As someone who doesn't know much about types, do SBCL type declarations provide as good type-based development experience as OCaml and Rust?

And perhaps I wouldn't get your answer, I mean is there something fundamentally inadequate in the way SBCL declares types? I think there is a phrase for it in CS theory.
2 comments
medo-bear 637 days ago
> As someone who doesn't know much about types, do SBCL type declarations provide as good type-based development experience as OCaml and Rust?

First of all, op was talking about strongly typed languages. Asking are they good as statically typed ones like Rust and OCaml is raising the goal posts quite a bit.

Second of all, SBCL can indeed have a subsection of its code expressed in OCaml-like static types, see

https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton

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cardanome 637 days ago
To add to the other comment, it is also important to understand in the more interactive mode of developing in CL. You basically have the program always running, fixing bugs and adding features while it is running.

You simply don't have the problem of batch style programming where you have written a bunch of code and now you want to know if it works so you run a lot of static analysis on it beforehand because running it and getting it to the point and state that is relevant costs time.

In CL you don't end up with lots of code that has never been run. You have constantly run it during development and are much more confident about its behavior. So just having this interactive way of programming already leads to much more reliable software. It is not a replacement for static analysis or unit testing of course but another pillar to help you write more correct software.

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