Things I Was Wrong About: Types

At least in JavaScript, these are flagged by a linter. I imagine Python has a decent linter and code editor integration of said linter?

I don't really see most of my code being improved that much by types and I also see a lot of extra complexity that people in the sphere I am (indie games) have to deal with when using typed languages. It just doesn't seem worth it. When you have to spend a lot of time fighting your language, and handling numerous extra concepts that don't exist in an untyped language because they don't need to, it feels like the people who swear by typed languages that they simply like creating extra work for themselves as a way to avoid doing what's actually needed to be done, just because they want to feel productive.

I also suspect that a lot of this has to do with people's personalities around the concept of borders. Some people like well defined borders in general in everything they do because they approach life from a more procedural perspective, and for procedures to work they need things to be in the right boxes and in the right places. While others prefer borders to be undefined and more free-flowing because more information can pass through concepts and that allows for a more unstructured design process. It only puzzles me that there's so much energy in indie game development for highly bordered programming environments (i.e. all the energy being put into gamedev Rust libraries) when indie developers tend to be people who value borders less, as do all creative types. But I guess people really like types...

IMO types in Python mostly pay for themselves when you develop in a team.

They greatly improve the developer experience by providing automatically enforced documentation. Allows IDEs to provide code completions etc.

Types are important and necessary.

Can you skip them in a typed language? Yes, just use any, Object or whatever the equivalent.

Can you add them to an untyped language? No.

They are not needed anywhere. But I argue that especially JavaScript module-systems would have benefited greatly from them.

A million lost hours in fixing obscure "undefined is not a function"-errors from output of highly dynamic pluggable build/transpiler-systems like webpack, requirejs, babel, buck etc. could have been avoided.

> But really, they're the light at the end of the tunnel once you've worked your way though the dynamic / weak typing minefield. It took me a lot of Python, Javascript, and Ruby for me to get there, but now I'm way more comfortable on the other side.

To me that was not the issue. It was, rather, discovering languages with powerful and expressive type systems.

My first job was in Java, most of my career afterwards was in Python. I've been type-curious for a while because of Haskell and OCaml and am very fond of Rust, I'd take a job in any of those happily.

Types in Java are still, today, largely verbose, hideous and extraneous. The cost / benefit is extremely low (or rather extremely high, you pay a very high cost for limited benefit, and the cost generally increases faster than the benefits). You can leverage types heavily, but it creates a codebase which is ridiculously verbose, inefficient (because every type is boxed), opaque, and simply doesn't look like any other Java codebase so will be very much disliked by most of the people you're working with. And the benefits from that will still, at the end of the day, be rather limited.