Comment by KingMob

> Homeopathy is very complex

But it's not complex at all; a better word is "elaborate". And it doesn't matter how elaborate a system spun from incorrect premises is, if the premises fall, the whole thing does, and homeopathy's premises are easily dismissed.

Very basic tenets of homeopathy involve things like excessive dilution to the point that mere molecules of an active ingredient remain, but which somehow attach "memories" to water molecules to achieve their effects.

Atomic physics points out that this is nonsense. And medical knowledge is under-girded by physics, obviously, so it's not unrelated.

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We can keep torturing the analogy if you like, but at the end of the day, Hickey's experience is not in static typing. His original background was in C++/Java, which have much simpler type systems, unlike Haskell/ML/Rust/Scala/Swift/etc.

Many people in the static typing world seem to think his criticism is just not that deep or subtle. Unnamed union types exist, existed at the time of Maybe Not, and just represent a different set of tradeoffs than named wrapper ones like Maybe. (Mostly around being explicit.)

It plays well at the conj, but most Clojurians are also inexperienced with modern type systems.