Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I've been using Clojure since the summer of 2009, started a startup with it, using it exclusively on one project right now... and I agree about static types. I love many many things about Clojure, its my favourite language to use and I find it very well designed over all. But proper first class static types are the one thing I wish it had.

My dream programming language is basically a statically typed Clojure.

I've on and off poked at trying to make something like that (parsed using instaparse, type checked in Clojure, compiled to C++ using https://github.com/arximboldi/immer for the data structures), but haven't had the time to really get anywhere with it. Plus, even if I succeeded, I wouldn't have the rich Clojure (and by extension, Java and Javascript) ecosystem.



Do you know about the Typed Clojure project? More or less Racket's contract system, for Clojure:

https://github.com/clojure/core.typed

To me, it's one of the great testaments to the power of Lisp that you can bolt on a static type system after the fact.


Yes, but it’s really not the same as first class static typing support. It also doesn’t help when none of the libraries you use have type annotations and when I last looked it was also quite slow.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: