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I don't remember when was the last time I've made a type related screw up. In my experience almost all bugs in my code (and there is plenty of them of course) a

by ivanhoe 10y ago

I don't remember when was the last time I've made a type related screw up. In my experience almost all bugs in my code (and there is plenty of them of course) are either something completely stupid like a typo, or some edge-cases not covered properly by code logic (which only proper testing and QA can catch). Back in the days of working in C/C++ things were different, I'd quite often forget to do some required casting. Of course, compiler would warn me about it, but it would still kill my flow, so I honestly never regretted moving to the land of dynamically typed languages. To me it significantly reduced the number of errors since you take one layer of complexity out and thus have less of dull errors you can possibly make. Not the other way around, as you imply.

the_af 10y ago
> I don't remember when was the last time I've made a type related screw up Maybe the languages you are using aren't capable of encoding the kind of screw ups you do make as type errors? Typos are trivially covered by most static type checkers, but like you say that's not a very interesting kind of error (except, of course, with languages that silently introduce fresh variables. Those can introduce hard to find errors...). More interestingly, they can also handle other problems like dereferencing nulls, not considering all possible patterns of a value (think "case" conditions), calling a function on the wrong kind of value, etc.
mannykannot 10y ago
I am not saying you are wrong, and I think the OP of this thread overstated the benefits of static typing, but here are a couple of counterpoints: > either something completely stupid like a typo... Typos are a bigger problem in languages that silently instantiate a new variable in response. If it's on the rhs, would you prefer your IDE to warn you about using an unititialized variable, or let it go? Your coding flow is paid for by more failures (some of which will be WTFs) in testing (and testing is part of coding these days, right?) That may be the right trade-off, in which case you may be able to disable warnings in your IDE. >...or some edge-cases not covered properly by code logic (which only proper testing and QA can catch). The 'only' suggests that they are inevitable, and they are in a statistical sense, but whenever my code logic fails to cover an edge case, I ask myself why I overlooked it. Sometimes it is not something I could have anticipated even if I had thought more about what I was doing, but often it is.
- ivanhoe 10y ago
  Just as you said, statistically speaking being stupid from time to time is an inevitable part of the process :) When I manage to anticipate every angle correctly then usually there is no bugs, so it's not that relevant for this discussion. I was talking about those "other" moments, and usually, yes you are completely right, it's just me not being focused or not looking from the right angle on the problem. Thing that really sucks in programming is that computers almost never make mistakes on their own, it's always us who screw up the code :P

by ivanhoe 10y ago

the_af 10y ago

> I don't remember when was the last time I've made a type related screw up Maybe the languages you are using aren't capable of encoding the kind of screw ups you do make as type errors? Typos are trivially covered by most static type checkers, but like you say that's not a very interesting kind of error (except, of course, with languages that silently introduce fresh variables. Those can introduce hard to find errors...). More interestingly, they can also handle other problems like dereferencing nulls, not considering all possible patterns of a value (think "case" conditions), calling a function on the wrong kind of value, etc.

mannykannot 10y ago

I am not saying you are wrong, and I think the OP of this thread overstated the benefits of static typing, but here are a couple of counterpoints: > either something completely stupid like a typo... Typos are a bigger problem in languages that silently instantiate a new variable in response. If it's on the rhs, would you prefer your IDE to warn you about using an unititialized variable, or let it go? Your coding flow is paid for by more failures (some of which will be WTFs) in testing (and testing is part of coding these days, right?) That may be the right trade-off, in which case you may be able to disable warnings in your IDE. >...or some edge-cases not covered properly by code logic (which only proper testing and QA can catch). The 'only' suggests that they are inevitable, and they are in a statistical sense, but whenever my code logic fails to cover an edge case, I ask myself why I overlooked it. Sometimes it is not something I could have anticipated even if I had thought more about what I was doing, but often it is.

ivanhoe 10y ago
Just as you said, statistically speaking being stupid from time to time is an inevitable part of the process :) When I manage to anticipate every angle correctly then usually there is no bugs, so it's not that relevant for this discussion. I was talking about those "other" moments, and usually, yes you are completely right, it's just me not being focused or not looking from the right angle on the problem. Thing that really sucks in programming is that computers almost never make mistakes on their own, it's always us who screw up the code :P