Hi, I've been an enthusiastic Clojure tinkerer for a few years now--it's a great language!--but only recently began using it professionally, where I've stumbled into a strong disagreement over the use of protocols vs. multimethods for single dispatch polymorphism. I had always assumed that protocols were a normal part of Clojure when polymorphism was called for, but a few of my coworkers (often, it seems, those who have experience with Lisp prior to Clojure) swear up and down that protocols are only to be used as a last resort because they "break the REPL". Apparently they're frowned upon because, due to the JVM interop, they don't reload as well as other constructs. It has even been suggested a few times that all uses of protocols should be refactored to use a multimethod with a "type" as the dispatch function. Protocols, in other words, should be considered harmful. This seems strange to me considering how many successful and mainstream Clojure projects use protocols, but maybe I am missing something, so I thought I would ask the list. So what is it? Is there any consensus around the assertion that "good, idiomatic Clojure will use multimethods rather than protocols for single-dispatch polymorphism"?
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