Why is the use of Maybe/Option not so pervasive in Clojure?
Why does Clojure, despite such an emphasis on functional paradigm, not use the Maybe / Option monad to represent optional values? The use of Option is quite pervasive in Scala, a functional programming language I use regularly. Clojure is not statically typed, so doesn't need the strict this/that/whatever type declarations that are necessary in haskell (and, I gather, Scala). If you want to return a string, you return a string; if you return nil instead, that's okay too. "Functional" does not correspond exactly to "strict compile-time typing". They are orthogonal concepts, and Clojure chooses