> Static Typing reduces bugs.
Imagine calling this “hype”. Good grief.
Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things
21–30 of 243 posts
Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things
#22There should be a section about the benefits of cold showers.
Is taking cold showers like a machismo SV thing?
Possibly, but it doesn't have to be only that, or without any merit. Cold baths and even winter swimming [1] (in icy water) are a thing in many parts of the world.
Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things
#23I wish it would be possible to have better studies for that. I believe that static typing has huge benefits as software scales. I also believe that the type system of TypeScript is actually stronger in practice than the Java or C# one (despite theoretical weaknesses). It has the right tradeoffs (e.g. structural equivalence, being able to type strings, being able to check that all cases are handled, etc.) It would be…
People who like static typing seem to really like static typing.
I'm honestly not convinced it helps that much. And it seems to cost a lot to me.
I like database and API schemas though. And I like clojure.spec and function preconditions a lot.
Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things
#24I love that sqlite article. It seems like "everyone" is certain that sqlite can only be used for up to a single query per second, anything more and you need to spin up a triple sharded postgres or Hadoop cluster because it 'needs to scale'. I love being able to show that study, if you properly architect your sqlite system and am willing to purchase hardware, you can go a long long way, much further than almost all co…
Why choose sqlite over MySQL on a single server (e.g. small vm instance)?
Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things
#25I love that sqlite article. It seems like "everyone" is certain that sqlite can only be used for up to a single query per second, anything more and you need to spin up a triple sharded postgres or Hadoop cluster because it 'needs to scale'. I love being able to show that study, if you properly architect your sqlite system and am willing to purchase hardware, you can go a long long way, much further than almost all co…
My favourite part is how they:
(a) built their own transaction/caching/replication layer using Blockchain no less.
(b) paid SQLite team to add a number of custom modifications.
(c) used expensive, custom, non-ephemeral hardware.
Now you could do all of this or just use an off the shelf database that you aren't having to write custom code to use and if you choose a distributed one e.g. Cassandra will be able to run on cheap, ephemeral hardware.
Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things
#26The big data one is outstanding.
If you don't have more data than can fit on a reasonably large hard drive, you do not have big data and you are likely able to process it faster and cheaper on one system.
Today that threshold would be around 10TiB.
Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things
#27I wish it would be possible to have better studies for that. I believe that static typing has huge benefits as software scales. I also believe that the type system of TypeScript is actually stronger in practice than the Java or C# one (despite theoretical weaknesses). It has the right tradeoffs (e.g. structural equivalence, being able to type strings, being able to check that all cases are handled, etc.) It would be…
I think it’s the wrong metric to look at. Static typing still leaves plenty of room for bugs. The capability and discipline of the team would likely be more of a factor than the type system so the studies would be hard to get right.
However I do think static typing provides an enormous benefit to picking up code that is 5 years old and written by someone else. The ability to see “this is a nonnullable int32 value type” greatly reduces the amount of paths you have to go down when you have to change something or understand what’s going wrong with it. Tradeoff is you end up with a lot more code to maintain...
Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things
#28We software engineers are still more like alchimists rather than chemists.
That list reminds me of [1], which rants about this state of affairs and [2] that puts many beliefs to the test.
[1] https://youtu.be/WELBnE33dpY
[2] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/making-software/9780596...
Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things
#29I wish it would be possible to have better studies for that. I believe that static typing has huge benefits as software scales. I also believe that the type system of TypeScript is actually stronger in practice than the Java or C# one (despite theoretical weaknesses). It has the right tradeoffs (e.g. structural equivalence, being able to type strings, being able to check that all cases are handled, etc.) It would be…
People who like static typing seem to really like static typing. I'm honestly not convinced it helps that much. And it seems to cost a lot to me. I like database and API schemas though. And I like clojure.spec and function preconditions a lot.
I think it gives people a sense of satisfaction in modeling real world in the relations between classes. The assertion seems to be that if to solve a problem it has to be correctly modelled into the type system of the language. Once the modelling is done correctly solution will arise by itself.
On the other end people who prefer weakly typed languages see problems as primarily that of data transformation. For example from HTML Form to Http Request to SQL Db to CSV File and so on.
Both approaches are differentiated by the perspective on the problem.
Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things
#30I wish it would be possible to have better studies for that. I believe that static typing has huge benefits as software scales. I also believe that the type system of TypeScript is actually stronger in practice than the Java or C# one (despite theoretical weaknesses). It has the right tradeoffs (e.g. structural equivalence, being able to type strings, being able to check that all cases are handled, etc.) It would be…
People who like static typing seem to really like static typing. I'm honestly not convinced it helps that much. And it seems to cost a lot to me. I like database and API schemas though. And I like clojure.spec and function preconditions a lot.
I don’t get the cost claims. The time it takes to note which type I intend something to be is mostly either so low that I recover it via improved hints and such very quickly, or larger but only because I’m documenting something complex enough that I should have documented it anyway, whether or not I was using static types, because it’ll be hell for other people or future-me to figure out otherwise. It seems like a large time savings to me—throw in faster and more confident refactoring and stuff like that, and it’s not even close.
I just don’t get how people are working that it represents a time cost rather than a large time savings. I don’t mean that as a dig, I just mean I genuinely don’t know what that must look like. And I’ve written a lot more code in dynamic languages, and got my start there, so it’s not like I “grew up” writing Java or something like that.