The compiler should know it for you, so you cannot get it wrong no matter what. The REPL here is a band-aid not a solution.
I mean, I love Clojure, and used it for personal and work projects for 10+ years, some of which have hundreds of stars on github. But I cannot count the time wasted to spot issues where a map was actually a list of maps. Here Elixir is doing the right thing - adding gradual typing.
> But I cannot count the time wasted to spot issues where a map was actually a list of maps.
Sorry, I'm having hard time believing that. I don't know when was the last time you've used the language, but today there are so many different ways to easily see and analyze the data you're dealing with in Clojure - there are tons of ways in CIDER, if you don't use Emacs - there are numerous ways of doing it in Calva (VSCode) and Cursive (IntelliJ), even Sublime. There are tools Like Portal, immensely capable debuggers like Flowstorm, etc. You can visualize the data, slice it, dice it, group it and sort it - all interactively, with extreme ease.
I'm glad you've found great fondness for Elixir, it is, indeed a great language - hugely inspired by Clojure btw.
You still don't need to bash other tools for no good reason. It really does sound fake - not a single Clojure developer, after using it for more than a decade, would call a Lisp REPL "a band-aid and not a solution". It smells more like someone with no idea of how the tool actually works.
Maybe it's so. Or maybe you run my code in your deps. As you can see, there is at least one Clojure dev who thinks so.
I found spec very useful and damn expressive (and I miss it in other languages), but again that's runtime. I know Rich says such errors are "trivial", but they waste your time (at least mine).
To each their own. Some people (not me) say that Rust's pedantic compiler feels like bureaucratized waste of time akin passing through medieval Turkish customs. For me personally, working with Clojure dialects feels extremely productive. Even writing in Fennel, which is not Clojure, but syntactically somewhat similar is much faster for me than dealing with Lua. Even when I have to write stuff in other PLs, I sometimes first build a prototype in Clojure and then rewrite it. Although it sounds like spending twice the effort, it really helps me not to waste time.
I mean, I love Clojure, and used it for personal and work projects for 10+ years, some of which have hundreds of stars on github. But I cannot count the time wasted to spot issues where a map was actually a list of maps. Here Elixir is doing the right thing - adding gradual typing.