This is my experience as well. Referential transparency and immutability have many advantages, with few disadvantages (if any). Type checking is great as a way to enforce constraints. However, nominal types create unnecessary incompatibility and endless type shuffling every time you want to make even simple changes. I maintain a web app written in Haskell and there’s 3 or 4 different types for URLs in the codebase, even though there’s no real difference between them. Nominal typing is terrible for code reuse via third-party modules. So many hours wasted wrapping types or shuffling between them.
A functional language with a simple set of structural types would be the sweet spot for me. Clojure is probably the closest to this.
A functional language with a simple set of structural types would be the sweet spot for me. Clojure is probably the closest to this.