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I don't have Elixir experience, but the natural way to get started in modeling data and state in Clojure quite obviously involves less ceremony and scaffolding than what you do in Haskell, and is less work to change around.

Also, it's not just the amount of work, it's the complexity of the language. Clojure is really simple, so you don't h ave to spend much of your cognitive capacity juggling things related to the language or operating a mental simulation of the type system.



I totally understand what you mean! At least I think I do. I have spent a significant amount of time going down the "type flex" rabbit hole. You can always make thinks a little safer, a little more concise, and so on.

In that sense I really do get off the ground much, much faster in Clojure. In fact, it's my favorite language for prototyping and the whole interactive execution model of the REPL makes we want to learn Emacs and do everything in some kind of lisp, rather than awk, sed, bash, dash, whatever.

I think the key ingredient for me with Haskell is to know when to stop. You can be very productive even as an intermediate Haskell user if you restrict yourself to the features with the highest return on investment. Everything else can be done later. But I also know that it's very tempting to stress out over these details.

As a very late conclusion to my various comments in this thread: if I got better at taming type related errors in Clojure I could very well see it being my go-to language for everything.




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