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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

"Most errors are picked up by the type checker immediately at the start of the build, rather than by the unit-tests at the end. That saves a lot of time."

Better tooling would help so that you'd get the error checking as you type. Are there any good configurations for vim or Emacs, for example?

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Merlin for Vim is an absolute delight to use. You get auto-complete, indentation, compile-on-save, type checking right within your editor with less than 5 lines of configuration.

For someone new to the type system, it helps a lot to compulsively keep checking the types of the expressions as you go along building the program. Highly recommended.

PS: If you prefer screenshots - https://twitter.com/prakharsriv9/status/689141428161802241

Also, destructuring for pattern-matching is pretty cool.

It surely is. But how does Merlin help with that?

Like that: http://the-lambda-church.github.io/merlin/destruct.ogv

Really nice.

I used Merlin pretty extensively, yet this example had me sitting there with an open mouth, staring in awe.

The funniest thing is that in my experience Merlin just seems to work. When I think about how many hoops I need to jump through with the Clojure REPL to connect it to CIDER in Emacs, Merlin just works in the background without me having to think about it at all. Very impressive.

Yes, you can have a look at merlin: https://github.com/the-lambda-church/merlin

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