Comment by nequo
14 days ago
This seems like a meaningless criticism when it comes to immutability in Clojure. You can have mutability in Haskell too. That doesn’t make it as unsafe as memory management in C++.
14 days ago
This seems like a meaningless criticism when it comes to immutability in Clojure. You can have mutability in Haskell too. That doesn’t make it as unsafe as memory management in C++.
> You can have mutability in Haskell too.
Haskell enforces this via a type system.
What safeguards around mutability does Clojure have?
If I import a method 'foo()', is there any kind of contract, notation ... anything which could suggest whether it mutates or not?
> What safeguards around mutability does Clojure have?
Very nearly the entire language and standard library operate on immutable values only. Immutable values are the default, and you will use them for the vast majority of logic. You must do so, unless you very specifically opt to use dedicated reference types, at which point you’ll still need to produce intermediate immutable values to interact with that vast majority of the standard library.
And…
> is there any kind of contract, notation ... anything which could suggest whether it mutates or not?
Functions which mutate state are almost always suffixed !. They will typically fail if you pass them immutable values; they only operate on reference types, which have to be dereferenced (typically with the prefix @) to access their state.