Yep. Same here - I had always thought I agreed with all the arguments mentioned in the post, and then I found Clojure. I'd like to add that I don't know if there are any existing refactoring tools for Clojure, but there certainly could be. All the things that you might want to rename safely - say functions and keywords (used for hashmap access, and serve as sort of Clojure class fields) are proper symbols, well defined in a namespace. You could have a tool that renames them safely. In Scala, OTOH, a statically typed language, you can't even rename methods safely because they're not always referenced through their defining types, as they could be called through an injected so called "structural type". So nowadays, some statically typed langiuage lose, through cleverness, many of the advantages of static typing, while dynamically typed languages, through disciplined restraint, manage to gain them.
EDIT: actually, the one thing I miss most from statically typed languages is the immediate error highliting in the IDE. The REPL alleviates the need for that, but it was still cool immediately seeing files and lines highlighted in red as soon as I type in some error. I wish Clojure could do that.
No, what Scala is giving you is the choice: use structural types, and sacrifice some of the benefits of nominal types, or don't. Note that if you perform your renaming and now class C no longer matches structural type S, any part of the code that depended on that typing will no longer compile: safety is preserved. Structural types therefore only make renaming slightly less automatic. (And they're rarely used anyway.)
I'm also skeptical of your claim about Clojure symbols: can you not select a field using a runtime-computed values, thereby making perfect static refactoring intractable?
Like I said, I do miss instant IDE error highlighting.
You could select fields using computed values in any language using reflection, but no, 99 times out of a hundred you use explicit symbols ("keywords") in Clojure.
Looking into keywords a bit, it seems that auto-rename is only going to work for namespace-qualified keywords, and even then, it's going to be hard if the ::keyword syntax is used, because the current namespace is determined dynamically.
> I don't know if there are any existing refactoring tools for Clojure, but there certainly could be.
Maybe, but they would be imprecise and they would require developer supervision. When the tool doesn't have any types, it can't reason about the code accurately.
Here is an article that explains why in more depth:
Indeed. They refute the claim in the post that search-and-replace was "the best [Smalltalk] could do". The author ought to have corrected his post, but instead just ignored this.
EDIT: actually, the one thing I miss most from statically typed languages is the immediate error highliting in the IDE. The REPL alleviates the need for that, but it was still cool immediately seeing files and lines highlighted in red as soon as I type in some error. I wish Clojure could do that.