Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cold Showers

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 363 posts

Re: Cold Showers

#101

Post by drujensen »

sumy23 wrote: post #62
cloogshicer wrote: post #14

> 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.

It’s basically self-evident that static analysis reduces bugs. It’s trivial to construct an example of where type information would catch a bug. Unless there is some reason that including type information increases bugs, the existence of a single example where type information catches a bug would prove that overall type information reduces total bug count.

This reminds me of the studies done related to traffic lights and stop signs.

Removing traffic lights and stop signs actually reduces accidents because drivers are more careful when driving through intersections which reduces speeds and drivers become more alert.

Developers will adapt to their toolset. If you have a statically typed language, you trust it will deal with type related issues and you become more lax with testing things related to types. When you develop in non-typed languages like Ruby, you tend to write more tests and not trust your compiler (because you don't have one). This is why you will find most Ruby developers are really good at writing tests and embracing TDD.

Re: Cold Showers

#102

Post by moffkalast »

aranchelk wrote: post #78

> Hype: "Static Typing reduces bugs." It’s only hype because it’s imprecisely stated. Static type systems make entire classes of bugs impossible at runtime. The stronger (read less permissive) the type system, the more classes of bugs cannot occur.

On the other hand it increases development time and makes modifications and new features much harder to implement. If you took it to the extreme, you could also mathematically prove your code is correct for every input variable.

Everything's a trade-off, the question is which approach is best for your application. Your average website doesn't warrant as much rigor as a Mars rover.

Re: Cold Showers

#103

Post by repsilat »

klysm wrote: post #68
cloogshicer wrote: post #14

> 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.

Refactoring with confidence that you didn’t forget somewhere.

Yeah, a common mode when I'm making changes is "add a field to the type, run the type-checker, fix all the failures."

In a sense "type coverage" is analogous to test coverage.

Re: Cold Showers

#104

Post by [deleted] »

drujensen wrote: post #101
sumy23 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s basically self-evident that static analysis reduces bugs. It’s trivial to construct an example of where type information would catch a bug. Unless there is some reason that including type information increases bugs, the existence of a single example where type information catches a bug would prove that overall type information reduces total bug count.

This reminds me of the studies done related to traffic lights and stop signs. Removing traffic lights and stop signs actually reduces accidents because drivers are more careful when driving through intersections which reduces speeds and drivers become more alert. Developers will adapt to their toolset. If you have a statically typed language, you trust it will deal with type related issues and you become more lax wit…

[deleted]

Re: Cold Showers

#105

Post by [deleted] »

tasuki wrote: post #96
chrisseaton wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't think a scientific study is needed. There exist different classes of bugs. The stronger static typing, the more classes of bugs become impossible to make . You will not see a NullPointerException in Haskell. The only way in which strong static and dynamic typing could produce the same number of bugs would be if strong static typing resulted in introducing other bugs, ones which wouldn't be introduced in a dyn…

[deleted]

Re: Cold Showers

#107

Post by tharkun__ »

thom wrote: post #77
sumy23 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s basically self-evident that static analysis reduces bugs. It’s trivial to construct an example of where type information would catch a bug. Unless there is some reason that including type information increases bugs, the existence of a single example where type information catches a bug would prove that overall type information reduces total bug count.

One could argue that dynamically typed code is often shorter, and therefore both easier to reason about, and possessed of fewer bugs on a bugs-per-line basis. Not really keen to push that line of reasoning myself, just helping picture one possible argument.

I would even argue that shorter can do the opposite. You can squeeze an awful lot of information into a tight space in dynamically typed languages that allow functional programming and especially with terse syntax for often used constructs.

This can make it much harder to actually reason about the code, while making it seem easier to reason about. Most people would agree w/ your reasoning on a short piece of logic, which then at runtime spectacularly fails because the inputs don't adhere to the types you expected. In a statically typed language you would not even have gotten it to compile and while it might not feel like a bug is being prevented and actually feel tedious, every time your IDE (or compiler) tells you that the type on something is wrong, you've prevented a potential bug.

Re: Cold Showers

#108

Post by moffkalast »

QuarterReptile wrote: post #30
number6 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Times I can't bring myself to get into a cold shower. If I start warm I can cool down from there. Is there a way to start cold and go even colder?

The way to start cold is to stick your head/face directly in to start the shower. That gives you the strongest mammalian dive response. Not sure if that offsets any of the cold shower benefit though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_reflex Edit: This is also the time of year to do this, while the tap water is probably warmer and your house is warmer. I wouldn't try to acclimate in winter.

So in short, jump into a pool instead?

Re: Cold Showers

#109

Post by woojoo666 »

_0w8t wrote: post #84

For me the biggest advantage of static typing is that it allows to safely refactor code. Without it even with extensive unit test coverage refactoring often is just not an option.

So many people in the thread saying this. But in my experience refactoring large code bases in both Java and Javascript, it's roughly the same. Ultimately the real answer will have to come from a peer reviewed study, because as the post suggests, these sorts of things are not as intuitive as people think

Re: Cold Showers

#110

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #12

> Benchmarking cutting-edge graph-processing algorithms running on 128-core clusters against a single-threaded 2014 Macbook Pro. The laptop consistently wins, sometimes by an order of magnitude. LOL, this hits close to home. My company had a modeling specific VM set up to run our predictive modeling pipelines. Typical pipeline is about 50,000 to 5 million rows of training data. At best, using an expensive VM, we mana…

Haha! Back in ~2014 or so my company was spending nearly $30,000/month on an EC2 "compute-optimized" cluster to transcode live video streams to multiple renditions. One of our engineers said hey, why don't we try to colo some real hardware? We did a test with a single bare-metal 8-core Xeon server and it completely destroyed the performance of the EC2 "compute-optimized" cluster!

After that we colo'd 4 big Xeon servers for about $1,600/month total. Looking back on it now it's just so insane...$30,000? no way.

Post reply on HN