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by andersmurphy 18 days ago
Lisp/smalltalk programmers have been going on about this tradeoff for a long time. It mattered before LLMs too. Lisp/Clojure repl allowing you to compile tiny parts of your program inside your running program is incredible for your feedback/iteration loop.

Ironically, this is also what makes them shine with LLMs, the LLM has access to the running program and can modify it while it's running to get feedback instantly.

Complex type systems are cool. But, they are not free. I say this as someone who's first programming language was Haskell.

1 comments

> I say this as someone who's first programming language was Haskell.

Amazing. How did that happen? Is it true that functional programming is only counterintuitive because almost everyone starts out with an imperative language?

Philip Walder (one of the creators of Haskell) was our lecturer for my CS introductory course. I'd never done any programming before then.

Yes, imperative languages were initially counter intuitive to me. OO was even worse. SQL was fine as it's more declarative/functional.