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The type system is a programmer's best friend

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Re: The type system is a programmer's best friend

#391

Post by emodendroket »

waprin wrote: post #220
emodendroket wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t disagree that it makes things much more pleasant, but I started doing this around 2013, which, while old, was still a year beginning with 20, and consensus was trending the opposite way and people were bullish about stuff like Ruby. The pendulum has really swung in the other direction.

I noticed this too and I have a simple explanation. Ruby and Python overtook Java and C++ in the early 2010s in _spite_ of their lack of a good typing system, not because of it. On the whole, they are much more productive languages. Now we're seeing languages that have Ruby / Python productivity but also have much better ways of static typing such as Typescript and Swift. And the Ruby / Python community is more open…

This seems compelling. I do think Java has done a lot to mitigate the tedium of writing it in the meantime but my acquaintance with it is pretty casual.

Re: The type system is a programmer's best friend

#392

Post by throwaway2037 »

jlarocco wrote: post #227
noveltyaccount wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I graduated college in the '00s I thought Vim was the most amazing thing I'd ever learned. Then a colleague at my first job showed me what happend when you typed . after a variable name in Visual Studio. Code completion, inline documentation...my mind was blown, and I never looked back. When I meet a young chap extolling the benefits of Vim or Emacs or really anything that doesn't have stepped debugging and code…

> When I meet a young chap extolling the benefits of Vim or Emacs or really anything that doesn't have stepped debugging and code competition...well, there are no bonus points for doing things the hard way. I can't speak for Vim, but Emacs has stepped debugging, code completion, etc. Part of the reason I use Emacs is that I get those features and (and a ton more) with the same light weight interface across multiple l…

You wrote: >

I'm confused. The point of uber-IDEs (IntelliJ, Eclipse, NetBeans, VSCode): You only need to learn one IDE. Each language is just another plug-in.

Re: The type system is a programmer's best friend

#393

Post by throwaway2037 »

outworlder wrote: post #337
noveltyaccount wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I graduated college in the '00s I thought Vim was the most amazing thing I'd ever learned. Then a colleague at my first job showed me what happend when you typed . after a variable name in Visual Studio. Code completion, inline documentation...my mind was blown, and I never looked back. When I meet a young chap extolling the benefits of Vim or Emacs or really anything that doesn't have stepped debugging and code…

> When I meet a young chap extolling the benefits of Vim or Emacs or really anything that doesn't have stepped debugging and code competition...well, there are no bonus points for doing things the hard way. Why do you think they are doing things "the hard way"? Emacs can have all the things you have described. And it can do that for languages that are not part of the .NET Framework, they just have to have a language…

You wrote: > Can you name any?

Re: The type system is a programmer's best friend

#394

Post by flippinburgers »

noveltyaccount wrote: post #151
highwaylights wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d take this further. I was listening to the John Carmack episode of Lex Fridman from the summer, and he makes a comment about being frustrated that in the Valley there’s an almost religious opposition to IDEs, debuggers, and static analysis. Some of those tools have only become more powerful over time and I’m perplexed as to the mindset that would make a person averse to automating the drudgiest parts of their job…

When I graduated college in the '00s I thought Vim was the most amazing thing I'd ever learned. Then a colleague at my first job showed me what happend when you typed . after a variable name in Visual Studio. Code completion, inline documentation...my mind was blown, and I never looked back. When I meet a young chap extolling the benefits of Vim or Emacs or really anything that doesn't have stepped debugging and code…

I am older than you and use neovim. It has code completion thank you very much.

Re: The type system is a programmer's best friend

#395

Post by throwaway2037 »

deltasevennine wrote: post #168
gary17the wrote: post #104

This is, IMvHO, such old news that it feels... weird to still read about it in a year with the prefix of 20. Every programmer who has ever single-handedly written a 100,000+ LOC software system will tell you the same thing: shift as much responsibility on the compiler as you can and have the compiler check the code you write to any extent technologically possible. Getting rid of bugs by experiencing, diagnosing and f…

But there's a paradox. Why does 100,000 lines of code of python tend to be safer and more manageable then 100,000 lines of C++ despite the fact that python has no type checker and C++ has a relatively advanced type checker? Why do startups choose a python web stack over a C++ web stack? I don't think it's "self-evident." I think there's something more nuanced going on here. Hear me out. I think type systems are GREAT…

I would not use C++ in your comparison. Try with C# or Java. Not even close. They will crush in developer productivity and maintenance over Python, Ruby, Perl, JavaScript.

Re: The type system is a programmer's best friend

#396

Post by throwaway2037 »

gary17the wrote: post #203
deltasevennine wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there's a paradox. Why does 100,000 lines of code of python tend to be safer and more manageable then 100,000 lines of C++ despite the fact that python has no type checker and C++ has a relatively advanced type checker? Why do startups choose a python web stack over a C++ web stack? I don't think it's "self-evident." I think there's something more nuanced going on here. Hear me out. I think type systems are GREAT…

> So basically compile time type checking just makes some of the errors get caught earlier which is a slight benefit but not a KEY differentiator. Unfortunately, I have to completely disagree here, at least based on my experience. Shifting software error detection from runtime to compile time is absolutely paramount and, in the long run, worth any additional effort required to take advantage of a strong type system.…

"financial trading systems" This is a myth. Many financial trading systems are written in C# and Java. Don't be distracted by the 1% of hedge funds with lousy funding that need nanosecond reactions to make money. If you have good funding, product diversity matters more than speed.

Otherwise, your post is excellent. Lots of good points. SQLite is something that EADS/ESA/NASA/JAXA would write for a aeroplane / jet fighter / satellite / rocket.

Re: The type system is a programmer's best friend

#397

Post by throwaway2037 »

closeparen wrote: post #348
maxbond wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever so slightly longer compile times. It's pretty close to a free lunch. There are only tradeoffs when we are at the frontier of what's possible with a set of technologies, and so must trade off on something in order to move along that frontier[1]. Many languages aren't operating at that frontier, and adding static typing is free (in the marginal case, ignoring the substantial effort to implement the type system). I…

People using dynamic languages deeply, especially library and framework authors, regularly write abstract/generic code for which a suitable type declaration would be mind-bendingly difficult in a very sophisticated type system and impossible in a weak one. You can argue that this is ill-advised! But static typing with normally-powered type systems leads to more voluminous and more purpose-specific code. Very powerful…

Can you provide a concete example? If you do, I am sure Rust/C++/C/Java/C# programmers can show you how to implement in their language.

Re: The type system is a programmer's best friend

#398

Post by xigoi »

deltasevennine wrote: post #365
xigoi wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does 100,000 lines of code of python tend to be safer and more manageable then 100,000 lines of C++ despite the fact that python has no type checker and C++ has a relatively advanced type checker? Because C++ sucks, but static types are not to blame for that.

My point here is that static types didn't do much to improve C++. We should be focusing on what made C++ bad. The things that made C++ bad and the fixes for those things are what makes python Good. I'm saying type checking is not one of those things.

Well, I personally find Python much more pleasant to code in when using type annotations and MyPy. Have you tried that?

Re: The type system is a programmer's best friend

#399

Post by jstimpfle »

jstimpfle wrote: post #353
rowanG077 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML escaping requires you to look for characters to escape for it to not interfere with HTML. This is quite literally validating symbols in the input. If they fail validation they need to be escaped. It's literally IMPOSSIBLE to do escaping without first validating every single symbol in the input.

So you're "validating" symbols now (strange choice of word). But certainly validating that the higher-level construct that we're escaping is an email address. Because the escaping procedure doesn't care.

I meant to say "certainly _not_ validating"

Re: The type system is a programmer's best friend

#400

Post by snickerer »

pencilguin wrote: post #269
snickerer wrote: post #262

I summarize the article as "use OOP and design your classes well".

Has absolutely nothing whatever to do with OOP. OOP, where it means anything at all, involves runtime selection of operations according to types organized in hierarchies. TFA is about compile-time type compatibility enforcement.

Sorry, I was not clear enough.

I come from the C++ world, where it is natural that types are checked at compile time. And where you would use classes to implement the 'sophisticated types' the author suggested.

So in the ears of a C++ programmer the article says: design your classes well.

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