I've only been in the industry for ~15 years, but it still feels like every year, some ecosystem discovers the value of something that another ecosystem has taken for granted for decades - type-checking, immutability, unidirectional data-flow, AOT-compilation, closures, pure functions, you name it. I'm glad we seem to be converging on a set of best practices as an industry, but sometimes I wish we were spending less time rediscovering the wheel and more time building on top of and adding to the actual state of the art.
Tests aren’t enough: Case study after adding type hints to urllib3
11–20 of 205 posts
Re: Tests aren’t enough: Case study after adding type hints to urllib3
#12It is extremely funny to me watching Silicon Valley types slowly (very slowly) re-invent everything we knew about programming languages decades ago.
Re: Tests aren’t enough: Case study after adding type hints to urllib3
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who don't think types are a good thing need to work in a statically typed language for a year or two and then see what a difference it makes in reality. Unproductive Java bureaucracy != static typing. I think the people debating it never tried it seriously.
I’ve done everything from Haskell to Java and I still strongly prefer Clojure and Common Lisp-style dynamic types.
I'm curious, after having done a significant amount of Haskell, I have flipped that opinion. The biggest difference is how the types help make things explicit and clear.
(although, IMO, I think purity makes a very large impact here too)
Re: Tests aren’t enough: Case study after adding type hints to urllib3
#14I've only been in the industry for ~15 years, but it still feels like every year, some ecosystem discovers the value of something that another ecosystem has taken for granted for decades - type-checking, immutability, unidirectional data-flow, AOT-compilation, closures, pure functions, you name it. I'm glad we seem to be converging on a set of best practices as an industry, but sometimes I wish we were spending less…
I think the problem is to figure out what the best practices actually are.
What we are observing here is „the market fixing it“.
The process is messy and redundant, but effective.
Re: Tests aren’t enough: Case study after adding type hints to urllib3
#15Honestly will never go back to languages without type checking, it prevents so many bugs and is a huge help in understanding code you haven’t worked with previously.
It is kind of ridiculous not to have types. I think in the old days handling types felt to heavy for scripting languages, but now with type inference and stuff I don't think it is any longer.
Re: Tests aren’t enough: Case study after adding type hints to urllib3
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who don't think types are a good thing need to work in a statically typed language for a year or two and then see what a difference it makes in reality. Unproductive Java bureaucracy != static typing. I think the people debating it never tried it seriously.
I’ve done everything from Haskell to Java and I still strongly prefer Clojure and Common Lisp-style dynamic types.
i have a small side project in clojure [1] and i always miss type checking when working on it. not by much because it's a small project but i am tired of iseq is not a function error.
Re: Tests aren’t enough: Case study after adding type hints to urllib3
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who don't think types are a good thing need to work in a statically typed language for a year or two and then see what a difference it makes in reality. Unproductive Java bureaucracy != static typing. I think the people debating it never tried it seriously.
I’ve done everything from Haskell to Java and I still strongly prefer Clojure and Common Lisp-style dynamic types.
I have to agree, I've done over 5 years of C# and then went to ruby and never looked back. Static type checking raises the floor on incompetence, but also lowers the ceiling on excellence. I have to admit I don't have experience with the extremes which would be Haskell and Clojure.
The amount of cruft I had to type in C# just to get shit done... It's all implicit in ruby thank god for that.
I never EVER have to check the type of a variable at runtime. I always know its type just by looking at its name. Is it enforced in ruby? Of course not. Ruby assumes I'm an adult and I know that I'm doing.
Re: Tests aren’t enough: Case study after adding type hints to urllib3
#18Honestly will never go back to languages without type checking, it prevents so many bugs and is a huge help in understanding code you haven’t worked with previously.
> Honestly will never go back to languages without type checking, it prevents so many bugs and is a huge help in understanding code you haven’t worked with previously.
I see static types as one of the most powerful communication tools around, as far as code goes. I can't relate at all to people complaining that they waste time. They must work very differently from how I do, is all I can figure. It's that, or they don't realize how much time they're losing to communication-related tasks, or refactoring, or writing (and maintaining!) extra or more verbose tests, or having even one more bug per year make it to production, or whatever, that'd be saved by static types, so aren't correctly accounting for the time savings. One of the two.
Re: Tests aren’t enough: Case study after adding type hints to urllib3
#19I love static typing/type hints if for only 1 thing - code maintenance.
Even code I wrote six months ago.
Not having to dig through 6 functions deep to try to figure out whether "person" is a string, or an object, and if it's an object what attributes it has on it etc. is huge. And not to mention that some clever people decide - hey, if you pass a string I'll look up the person object - so you can pass an object or a string - which makes all sorts of convoluted code paths when someone else was looking at "person" and only saw one type so now their function doesn't work on both types etc.
I hate having to waste time figuring out the type of every variable and hold it in my head every single time I read a piece of code.
Re: Tests aren’t enough: Case study after adding type hints to urllib3
#20I've only been in the industry for ~15 years, but it still feels like every year, some ecosystem discovers the value of something that another ecosystem has taken for granted for decades - type-checking, immutability, unidirectional data-flow, AOT-compilation, closures, pure functions, you name it. I'm glad we seem to be converging on a set of best practices as an industry, but sometimes I wish we were spending less…
I've been alive long enough to see that most things are useful, and all things are oversold.
More, the nice easy things to build with major restrictions pretty much gets thrown out the window for complicated things that have constraints that most efforts don't have. This isn't just a software thing. Building a little shed outside? Would be silly to use the same rigor that goes into a high rise. Which would be crazy to use the same materials engineering that goes into a little shed.