With all due respect, I think your argument is a little silly. Typos are the one mistake that programmers never stop making no matter how experienced they are, in my experience. For the same reason, you can pick up a book by an experienced, established writer and find typos in it as well.

It's useful for your tools to help you catch basic mistakes like that instead of just saying you should work with programmers who are competent enough to never write typos.

I don't think we are talking about that kind of typos. But there is a often a big dip in quality of people, who routinely struggle to write a half decent working program without making these kind of mistakes.

Sure every once in a while its possible for any one to drop in a spelling mistake, but those are rare situations in code. Mostly because code is often not a dead piece of documentation, which is read and auto corrected in the human brain. Code works on a computer with well defined interfaces and protocols.

Think of it this way, would you hire a programmer who often makes typos, to write shell scripts that have 'rm -rf'?

If you wouldn't, how often do you trust these people to execute DROP DATABASE <typo_database_name_which_happens_to_be_real>?

There is a big difference between programmers who can put in typos in a sentence in a code comment, and the kind of ones we are talking about.

I've deployed tens of thousands of lines of Clojure for a company over several years, and I still find that I occasionally destructure a map with the wrong keyword and I end up with nil accidentally. It's frustrating as much now as it has ever been. Because the app just crashes instead of a simple compiler check that most languages would offer to capture simple stuff like this.

You don’t have to be an absolute beginner to make this mistake. You just need to be on a project with inadequate test coverage.

They just disagree without explaining why. Anyways, I sometimes have typos in my Clojure code, but once I follow through with your mental model and just reproduce the problem in REPL it is easy to find these sort of bugs.

I'm not sure, but if people have problems, as bad as things like hiring programmers who struggle with indenting code, making typos in variable names, write functions hundreds of lines long, can't modularize code, write 3 nested for loops, or write nested if's where '&&' suffices.

Then you are having far bigger problems related to project management, hiring and overall direction in which you are running your team/company.

Clojure as a tool doesn't aim to fix these kind of problems. And it can be argued no tool will fix these problems.

> if people have problems, as bad as things like hiring programmers who struggle with indenting code, making typos in variable names

Those are the kind of things that the computer is best suited to. It's better if the programmer's brain is left to other, more challenging tasks.

One wonders what kind of challenging tasks a programmer who can't even indent code, can solve.

By the way indenting code happens to be the most basic of code review checks.

Code indentation has been automated away since like 10 years or ago or maybe even more.

Vim, Emacs, Atom, Sublime Text, Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ, NetBeans can all auto-indent code for you. Combined with linters they can also automate stylistic checks and coding convention.

I don't know anyone who indents code themselves. The editor/IDE does it for them.

Indenting code is certainly not a code review check. No sane workplace should waste a senior developer's precious time commenting about indentation problems during code reviews. It is a tooling check that is part of CI/CD.

Why waste human time on what can be done by a machine?

In my experience, a compiler would be wasting my time interrupting me with errors that are easily catch later, playing with the clojure REPL.