Things I Was Wrong About: Types

Post by bpicolo » Sun, Sep 27, 2020, 1:20 PM UTC

benjiweber wrote: post #10

TooCreative wrote: post #4

I code without types. My "proof", that types do not pay for themselves goes like this: Every time I encounter a bug (during coding, testing or in production) I make a note what type of bug it was and how it could have been prevented. Types are way down on the list of what could have prevented the bug. Especially for production bugs, which are the most important of course. It is so rare, that a bug could have prevente…

I find the value of static typing to be more from increasing the ease of exploration and understanding of a codebase than preventing bugs directly. The constraints on how the code you're reading could be being used making building a mental model faster. Not to mention the tooling built on top of the typing that can help with exploration.

Post by stult » Sun, Sep 27, 2020, 1:24 PM UTC

haileys wrote: post #6

An interesting insight I came across a little while ago is that for mainstream, industrial languages, this way of thinking about types is relatively new. It's not that we're seeing the pendulum swing back to types, it's that we're discovering them for the first time! In earlier typed languages, the types weren't there for reasons of soundness or productivity at all. The types were there for the compiler alone, as the…

Post by chrisoverzero » Sun, Sep 27, 2020, 1:28 PM UTC

stult wrote: post #103

haileys wrote: post #6

An interesting insight I came across a little while ago is that for mainstream, industrial languages, this way of thinking about types is relatively new. It's not that we're seeing the pendulum swing back to types, it's that we're discovering them for the first time! In earlier typed languages, the types weren't there for reasons of soundness or productivity at all. The types were there for the compiler alone, as the…

It seems pretty evident to me that most successful and popular dynamically and statically typed languages are converging from different directions on a similar set of solutions. Very much reflecting the phenomenon you describe. Some simple examples: C# has moved from very strong typing of the exact sort OP criticizes (`Person person = new Person();`) to increasingly permitting looser/more expressive typing with `var`…

Post by i6ruce » Sun, Sep 27, 2020, 1:34 PM UTC

orwin wrote: post #69

loup-vaillant wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statically typed languages (or at least the good ones) are disciplined so the programmer doesn't have to. If you can work reliably with dynamic typing, that means you are very disciplined about giving the right data to the right function, in exactly the right form. That you are very disciplined about tests, possibly including fairly stupid-looking unit tests (which aren't actually stupid, at least in a dynamic contex…

Yes. Try prototyping for a quick POC/casual demo with javascript, then try with typescript. If you get back to your demo two month later (or have one other person to explain your code to), typescript is Infinitely superior. For quick hacks types are not useful though.

Post by fulafel » Sun, Sep 27, 2020, 1:35 PM UTC

JackMorgan wrote: post #82

Types are controversial because we can't measure engineer productivity. Full stop. I see people on here arguing that they are faster one way or the other, yet we have absolutely no empirical evidence for such a claim. What makes it more complex is that "fighting with types" often takes one out of the flow in a different way than usual progamming challenges. Since it's unmeasurable, we cannot see the effect of product…