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Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

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Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#51

Post by luckylion »

coldtea wrote: post #20
dTal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is thinking that everything is a Silicon Valley thing, a Silicon Valley thing? Is it really plausible that no one thought to feel manly about cold showers until a bunch of nerds came along?

> Is it really plausible that no one thought to feel manly about cold showers until a bunch of nerds came along? No, but it's quite plausible that it was a niche thing that might have been a fad at some points in the past, only to be revived by a new generation that includes many fad-chacing types, SV people, and BS-artists (aka influencers)...

I'm pretty sure cold showers have been a thing to show your ability to live without comforts ever since hot showers became a possibility.

And the term fits here, I believe: cold showers do very much wake you up and bring you into reality quickly. There's no dreaming about hypes when you're under a cold shower.

Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#52

Post by j_m_b »

whatl3y wrote: post #19
quonn wrote: post #10

I 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've recently learned and ported a few projects from Javascript to TypeScript and I'll vouch that, so far, it is much better and easier to reason about my code and what it's doing. I also feel I need less test cases to adequately test my code. In saying that, I'm interested in if there is any accepted, peer reviewed literature with quantifiable data as to whether strongly typed languages are "better" (whatever the st…

How much would you attribute that to the fact that you rewrote the code? I know my second pass is always better.

Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#53

Post by Spooky23 »

Multicomp wrote: post #16

I 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…

This is true of anything SQL.

I've been so many solutions that would be easily and reliably implemented on a single or small SQL database cluster of various types that turn into these complex systems to avoid the costs of scaling up the RDBMS.

Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#54

Post by albntomat0 »

wccrawford wrote: post #31
GlennS wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on the situation. I've had code that absolutely benefited from static types and it helped me find bugs before they happened. But my current job has very, very little that would benefit from static typing. Adding it into the mix would slow us down, both literally and figuratively.

> But my current job has very, very little that would benefit from static typing

Would you mind expanding on this? I'd be interested in what processes you have and if you use any additional tooling.

Thanks!

Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#55

Post by the_af »

pantaloony wrote: post #30
GlennS wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

I agree with you. There is a related joke (?) that goes like this:

"I don't like to waste time writing tests, because I need that time to fix bugs on production that happened because I don't write tests".

The relation to static typing is that static types are a kind of test the computer automatically writes for you.

Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#56

Post by anonymoushn »

simiones wrote: post #49
pantaloony wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

I think the general feeling is that there are some code patterns that are safe and easy to do with dynamic typing, but impossible with simple type systems or more complex with more advanced type system. An example would be Common Lisp's `map` function [0] (it takes a number of sequences and a function that has as many parameters as there are sequences). It would be hard to come up with a type for this in Java, and it…

As an example of this, I've been working through Crafting Interpreters off and on. Chapter 5 consists mostly of discussion of the visitor pattern (is this the same thing as double dispatch?). The author notices that the amount of code that must be written to implement the design is so large that it's best to write a program to generate all of that code. I followed along as best I could, and at the end I wrote the equivalent code in my preferred language, which I've included in this comment:

  self[expr.type](self, expr)

Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#57

Post by doctor_eval »

quonn wrote: post #10

I 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 much prefer static typing - but the metric used in the article is around bug reduction. Regardless of static (Go or Java), dynamic (JS), or a bit weird (plpgsql), I don’t generally get the type of a variable or object wrong - because when I’m using the object I necessarily must already have a mental map of what it represents. It’s pretty rare to try to call the “fill()” method on a “line” object, so to speak, because I know it’s a line when I access it.

So I’d guess that the number of type related bugs in dynamic languages is just a little bit greater than in static languages, simply because it is harder to make that kind of mistake in a typed language. But as a category, they aren’t common mistakes in the first place.

I can confidently say that I’m a bit of an expert at writing bugs :) and of all the kinds of bugs I write, type related bugs are probably no where near the top of the list.

That’s not to say that static typing isn’t better - I definitely think it is. But I can also believe that it doesn’t necessarily reduce the bug count by a huge margin. (For whatever it’s worth I think the main benefits are documentation and refactoring...)

Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#59

Post by quonn »

nafey wrote: post #29
GlennS wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But I rarely use classes in TypeScript. I do think of things as data transformations but the types certainly help a lot.

Re: Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

#60

Post by the_af »

simiones wrote: post #49
pantaloony wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

I think the general feeling is that there are some code patterns that are safe and easy to do with dynamic typing, but impossible with simple type systems or more complex with more advanced type system. An example would be Common Lisp's `map` function [0] (it takes a number of sequences and a function that has as many parameters as there are sequences). It would be hard to come up with a type for this in Java, and it…

In my opinion, with few exceptions, the kind of programs advocates of dynamic typing want to write that static typing would have trouble dealing with, are artificial and not the common case. (Not "map" though, I need to review that case, but "map" is definitely a common and useful function!)

> Another example of many people's experience with static typing is the Go style of language

Remember that a lot of backlash against Go's type system comes from static typing advocates used to more expressive static type systems :) It'd be a shame if, after all we complained about Go's limitations, newcomers held Go as an example of why static typing is a roadblock...

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