I'll admit I didn't read these articles. However, all of these reek of: Claim! Thing good! Wait! Thing has downsides! It's not thorough comparison, it's just showing that everything in life has tradeoffs, which is obvious.
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Cold Showers
41–50 of 363 posts
Re: Cold Showers
#42> Static Typing reduces bugs. At least to me, the big advantage of static typing is not that it (allegedly) reduces bugs, but that it aids my understanding and helps in navigating the program. It's a tool for thinking and communicating.
Until the types don't match the execution model... see: python type hints
I find that is a far less common problem than the documentation being wrong. Even if someone doesn't add documentation for some library, static types provide a lot more insight into how it works than dynamic languages (Racket style contracts are even better since they can check way more than static types while still working in a first class way with docs).
Re: Cold Showers
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, how is this measured? My experience working over 3 decades with large teams also says this is so (static typing does prevent bugs) but that is not science. How do they measure this 'when you go and check'? I am really curious as I don't even understand how people make large systems without static typing and all massively complex systems that I personally have worked with that run for decades transacting billion…
We don't seem to be able to measure it, despite people trying several wacky approaches. Either that means it's hard to measure, or it means the effect is not actually there. Either way, this means that we cannot say that static typing reduces bugs. > all massively complex systems that I personally have worked with that run for decades transacting billions$ etc without flaws are all statically typed Did you try buildi…
I do reconsider it all the time; we only have short lives and I cannot build a lot large systems in my life. So that is why I asked if how it is measured. I see that my teams are more effective with static typing, but that also is my management as I, as I said, cannot really imagine writing large systems in not statically typed systems. I write a lot of scheme and k and bash and wrote a lot of tcl and Perl but never could get to scale like I can with statically compiled languages.
I lean more to dependently typed languages than dynamic as I simply saw only misery, but, again, this is not saying anything, it is just my experience. I am a bit afraid though, because there is no clear measurement, it is just anyone’s experience.
Edit; which actually would be fine; if it works for you and your team, company and business goals…
Re: Cold Showers
#44I'll admit I didn't read these articles. However, all of these reek of: Claim! Thing good! Wait! Thing has downsides! It's not thorough comparison, it's just showing that everything in life has tradeoffs, which is obvious.
That's not what this is, and if you'd bothered to look for more than a second, you'd seen that too. All the claims listed are very concrete claims that are possible to falsify, unlike "Thing good!", and the research (which, admittedly isn't directly linked, so it might be hard to find what research they're referring to) shows that this is either not true, or that the research is inconclusive. It is important not to take these statements for granted if they cannot be shown to be true; that's simply cargo-culting.
Re: Cold Showers
#45I'll admit I didn't read these articles. However, all of these reek of: Claim! Thing good! Wait! Thing has downsides! It's not thorough comparison, it's just showing that everything in life has tradeoffs, which is obvious.
Not reading things is an excellent way to establish for yourself the tautological obviousness of everything.
Re: Cold Showers
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article mentions the literature review is from 2014. Many older statically typed languages (Java/C/etc.) don’t enforce null safety. Tony Hoare called it his ‘billion dollar mistake’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare#Apologies_and_retra... Thankfully more modern type systems (Swift/Kotlin/F#/Rust/TypeScript/etc.) now do, hugely reducing the likelihood of runtime errors. As a mostly dynamic language develop…
> hugely reducing the likelihood of runtime errors You say this like it's a fact... but again nobody has been able to show this in a proper scientific study.
Considering how many null pointer bugs I've seen, I think that this is a case where absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (at least for null safety).
Re: Cold Showers
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found the same thing when doing video transcoding. The VPSs were all woefully underpowered. Netcup bare metal (root servers) ended up getting pretty close and were by far the best bang for the buck of anything I found.
Curious what the setup of VPS' was and why you would expect better than real hardware, video transcoding is quite a beast from what I remember and I just can't imagine there's a VPS solution that expects to keep up
The Intel Xeon processors that cloud providers typically use don't have the Intel Quick Sync core that provides hardware A/V encoding/decoding on typical desktop/laptop CPU SKUs. So the software has to fall back to CPU-based codecs, which are much slower.
AWS EC2 has a VT1 instance family that enables high-speed A/V encoding via a Xilinx media accelerator card.
Re: Cold Showers
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't seem to be able to measure it, despite people trying several wacky approaches. Either that means it's hard to measure, or it means the effect is not actually there. Either way, this means that we cannot say that static typing reduces bugs. > all massively complex systems that I personally have worked with that run for decades transacting billions$ etc without flaws are all statically typed Did you try buildi…
I do reconsider it all the time; we only have short lives and I cannot build a lot large systems in my life. So that is why I asked if how it is measured. I see that my teams are more effective with static typing, but that also is my management as I, as I said, cannot really imagine writing large systems in not statically typed systems. I write a lot of scheme and k and bash and wrote a lot of tcl and Perl but never…
> I see that my teams are more effective with static typing
If you think you really can see evidence for it then I'd encourage you to write up a paper and submit it for peer review. I guess when you sat down to write it you'd suddenly realise that you don't actually have any hard evidence.
> cannot really imagine writing large systems in not statically typed systems
Ok but lack of imagination is not science. Some people cannot imagine a spherical Earth, but that doesn't make it untrue.
For example I work on a system in a dynamically typed language (Ruby) that successfully handles tens of billions a year, so we know that it is possible. (We are adding optional static typing to it, but it was written without it.)
Re: Cold Showers
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do reconsider it all the time; we only have short lives and I cannot build a lot large systems in my life. So that is why I asked if how it is measured. I see that my teams are more effective with static typing, but that also is my management as I, as I said, cannot really imagine writing large systems in not statically typed systems. I write a lot of scheme and k and bash and wrote a lot of tcl and Perl but never…
> I see that my teams are more effective with static typing If you think you really can see evidence for it then I'd encourage you to write up a paper and submit it for peer review. I guess when you sat down to write it you'd suddenly realise that you don't actually have any hard evidence. > cannot really imagine writing large systems in not statically typed systems Ok but lack of imagination is not science. Some peo…
> Ok but lack of imagination is not science.
Sure, but that’s what I said in the first place. It all seems there is no evidence, not even empirical for either way. I was looking for any, if there was. MS or whatnot must have something no?
Re: Cold Showers
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> By empirical measure, static typing reduces bugs As the article says, this does not appear to be actually true when you go and check.
Well, how is this measured? My experience working over 3 decades with large teams also says this is so (static typing does prevent bugs) but that is not science. How do they measure this 'when you go and check'? I am really curious as I don't even understand how people make large systems without static typing and all massively complex systems that I personally have worked with that run for decades transacting billion…
A lot of the studies have been problematic because they look at toy problems (like leetcode problems). Static typing really starts to show its value in large projects. One huge project I'm aware of that uses a lot of python is the Sims 4 which uses it for a lot of the game engine and mods.