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Diminishing returns of static typing

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Re: Diminishing returns of static typing

#31

Post by drblast »

cm2187 wrote: post #3

The benefit of static typing isn't just reliability. Tooling is another major argument. Won't appeal to certain hardcore programmers who think that even notepad has too many features. But it is great for refactoring, finding all references to a function or a property or navigating through the code at design time. Basically all the features visual studio excels at for .net languages. And I disagree with the barrier to…

Definitely. Static typing lets you turn the compiler into a hard-working friend that helps you refactor large projects without going insane.

There are no diminishing returns. Defining types is easy and enhances code readability.

Re: Diminishing returns of static typing

#32

Post by cle »

emodendroket wrote: post #23
cle wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the autocomplete argument is rather unconvincing. Every dynamic language I've worked deeply with has powerful and simple introspection capabilities, and they generally come with much more interactive development environments (shell/REPL), so I've never found API discoverability to be any worse than statically typed languages, just different. In general though, the more you can formally reason about the program, t…

Does anyone believe in using the wrong tool for the job?

Yes! Many engineers use tools they like for reasons unrelated to the job they're doing or the product they're building.

Re: Diminishing returns of static typing

#33

Post by gnaritas »

cm2187 wrote: post #3

The benefit of static typing isn't just reliability. Tooling is another major argument. Won't appeal to certain hardcore programmers who think that even notepad has too many features. But it is great for refactoring, finding all references to a function or a property or navigating through the code at design time. Basically all the features visual studio excels at for .net languages. And I disagree with the barrier to…

I can do all of those things in Smalltalk, which is dynamically typed; these things are not byproducts of static typing, they're simply byproducts of mature tools. So no, these are not arguments in favor of static types.

Re: Diminishing returns of static typing

#34

Post by mwkaufma »

ruskimalooski wrote: post #14

These graphs really mean nothing. There is no data behind them. I might as well make a graph that conveys a non-descript correlation between how much an article bashes static typing & assertion and how high it is on HN.

You beat me to the same comment. It's pseudoscience. I guess they're measuring the anxiety at HN that people's sunk-costs in stringly-typed runtimes won't keep guarenteeing obscene salaries.

Re: Diminishing returns of static typing

#35

Post by Eridrus »

cm2187 wrote: post #3

The benefit of static typing isn't just reliability. Tooling is another major argument. Won't appeal to certain hardcore programmers who think that even notepad has too many features. But it is great for refactoring, finding all references to a function or a property or navigating through the code at design time. Basically all the features visual studio excels at for .net languages. And I disagree with the barrier to…

I think dynamic typing proponents get hung up on the auto-complete aspect. The real benefit is when you find someone writing a property with a common-ish name to a data structure and you want to know "who the hell uses this", you can answer that question pretty easy in statically typed languages. In dynamically typed languages you kind of just grep and hope the name is not too common.

Re: Diminishing returns of static typing

#36

Post by zzzcpan »

"I don't think it's particularly controversial, that static typing in general has advantages"

That's not really true, just a belief. I give you an example to start understanding these things: the exact same program written in a very high level and very expressive language, like Perl, instead of Go, is going to have at least 3 times less code and since defect rates per line of code are comparable, you would end up with at least 3 times less bugs. Suddenly reliability argument of static typing doesn't make any sense. That's because in PL research there is a huge gap in understanding of how programmers actually think.

Re: Diminishing returns of static typing

#37

Post by cle »

drblast wrote: post #31
cm2187 wrote: post #3

The benefit of static typing isn't just reliability. Tooling is another major argument. Won't appeal to certain hardcore programmers who think that even notepad has too many features. But it is great for refactoring, finding all references to a function or a property or navigating through the code at design time. Basically all the features visual studio excels at for .net languages. And I disagree with the barrier to…

Definitely. Static typing lets you turn the compiler into a hard-working friend that helps you refactor large projects without going insane. There are no diminishing returns. Defining types is easy and enhances code readability.

Believing that any technology has no cost is poor engineering IMO. There are costs to that rigidity, and they're rather self-evident.

Re: Diminishing returns of static typing

#38

Post by cm2187 »

fulafel wrote: post #9
cm2187 wrote: post #3

The benefit of static typing isn't just reliability. Tooling is another major argument. Won't appeal to certain hardcore programmers who think that even notepad has too many features. But it is great for refactoring, finding all references to a function or a property or navigating through the code at design time. Basically all the features visual studio excels at for .net languages. And I disagree with the barrier to…

Dynamic languages support this kind of tooling too - you can even have seamless data completion (eg. map/dictionary keys). The original Refactoring Browser was written for Smalltalk. Etc. Of course there are cases where dynamic languages do worse, but it balances out I think.

But how can you offer any refactoring or auto-complete inside a function if you don't know what type to expect as an argument?

Re: Diminishing returns of static typing

#39

Post by 19873287234 »

cm2187 wrote: post #3

The benefit of static typing isn't just reliability. Tooling is another major argument. Won't appeal to certain hardcore programmers who think that even notepad has too many features. But it is great for refactoring, finding all references to a function or a property or navigating through the code at design time. Basically all the features visual studio excels at for .net languages. And I disagree with the barrier to…

>Tooling is another major argument.

vscode seems to figure out the types in javascript without any static typing.

>But it is great for refactoring

Searching for strings isn't that much worse. Also, when it comes to web development, you cross into the client-side and suddenly you can't refactor. So you can only refactor the server-side and end up with a mismatch.

>finding all references to a function or a property or navigating through the code at design time

You can do that without static typing in many cases as well.

>Basically all the features visual studio excels at for .net languages.

When I was working in c# on the server and javascript on the client, I really hated having to go back into c#.

>telling you through a drop down what other options are available from there

vscode seems to be able to figure this out most of the time as well.

I think static typing is necessary when you need performance because all of the fast languages are statically typed.

I think a lot of these things are about organisational complexity and making sure new and average programmers don't screw up the software. It is about large companies trying to manage their organisation, it isn't about the complexity of the code itself.

There are a ridiculous amount of tech companies that have used dynamic languages to go from nothing to the biggest companies in the world and only switched to static languages well and truly after that occurred.

Re: Diminishing returns of static typing

#40

Post by namelost »

mattnewton wrote: post #15

I just don’t buy that go is some sort of sweet spot because it doesn’t have generics. Generics pretty much exist for maps and slices, because they are needed in real programs. The language designers just don’t let you make your own generic collections.

Yeah far from finding a sweet spot, Go exists in some kind of type system ghetto, because its type system is so crippled users have to resort to code generation (go generate).

Neither Python nor Java programmers have to do that.

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