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>... And? That's simply "not having unpredictable type-juggling." Literally what this entire thread is all about. Lots of languages have this issue and it man

>... And? That's simply "not having unpredictable type-juggling." Literally what this entire thread is all about. Lots of languages have this issue and it manifests in the instability and indeterminacy of large scale applications in Perl and PHP much as it does in javascript. Type hinting is, honestly, a pretty poor way of dealing with the problem of turning "1" + 1 into 2, but that's a separate issue.

Terr_ 10y ago
> [type juggling is] Literally what this entire thread is all about. No it isn't, that's just what you've been fixated on. Please re-read nostrademons' post, because you aren't actually addressing the issues they brought up, namely: > It's dynamic typing with a prototype-based object model. This type system [...] tends to be pretty bad at communicating invariants to other programmers or nailing down APIs for other subsystems to build off. While it's true that Python "fails nicer" than JS, it addresses neither of those two issues about preventing failures.
nostrademons 10y ago
While I think that JS's loose typing is a little annoying and certainly isn't what I'd build if I were designing the language from scratch, it just isn't much of a problem for me in practice. Type errors in general (either of the implicit coercion variety or the dynamic typing variety) aren't much of a problem. They rarely happen, and when they do, they usually take all of 5 minutes to track down and fix. I find that the big benefit of types are in documentation. They are executable, explicit, compiler-checked documentation of the programmer's intended usage. Without this, it becomes much harder to read through and comprehend a large codebase that was mostly written by other people. It becomes even harder to change it. I like Python, I like Javascript - but they have their uses, and those uses don't include large-scale mature software engineering. I actually argued otherwise for my first couple years at Google (where both are used extensively, though the JS is largely statically typed), but eventually saw the wisdom of more experienced engineers in this, and relegated my Python to exploratory coding.

Terr_ 10y ago

> [type juggling is] Literally what this entire thread is all about. No it isn't, that's just what you've been fixated on. Please re-read nostrademons' post, because you aren't actually addressing the issues they brought up, namely: > It's dynamic typing with a prototype-based object model. This type system [...] tends to be pretty bad at communicating invariants to other programmers or nailing down APIs for other subsystems to build off. While it's true that Python "fails nicer" than JS, it addresses neither of those two issues about preventing failures.

nostrademons 10y ago

While I think that JS's loose typing is a little annoying and certainly isn't what I'd build if I were designing the language from scratch, it just isn't much of a problem for me in practice. Type errors in general (either of the implicit coercion variety or the dynamic typing variety) aren't much of a problem. They rarely happen, and when they do, they usually take all of 5 minutes to track down and fix. I find that the big benefit of types are in documentation. They are executable, explicit, compiler-checked documentation of the programmer's intended usage. Without this, it becomes much harder to read through and comprehend a large codebase that was mostly written by other people. It becomes even harder to change it. I like Python, I like Javascript - but they have their uses, and those uses don't include large-scale mature software engineering. I actually argued otherwise for my first couple years at Google (where both are used extensively, though the JS is largely statically typed), but eventually saw the wisdom of more experienced engineers in this, and relegated my Python to exploratory coding.