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My main progamming language at the time is Java, and the amount of assistance my IDE provides is astonishing (to the surprise of no one, it's IntelliJ). The con

My main progamming language at the time is Java, and the amount of assistance my IDE provides is astonishing (to the surprise of no one, it's IntelliJ). The confidence strong automatic refactors provide is of great help when managing large codebases.

amirouche 9y ago
I agree that static typing helps reading comprehension and that IDEs like pycharm help getting into big code bases, that said, at the end of the day, when you know the code both the IDE and static typing are getting in the way. Actually, I never saw anybody as quick as people using simple editors like emacs and vim. GUI is getting in the way of the programmers intent. Static typing is a hindrance in front of refactoring. Unit tests is the only truth that matters, static typing or not.
- always_good 9y ago
  You're kinda damning it with faint praise when you say that you can use dynamically typed languages on small projects that fit in your head (and are also probably written by a single developer). You can pretty much use any language in that scenario. But the chickens come to roost around day 30+ or so.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    A large project is a poorly decoupled set of small projects.
    - orthecreedence 9y ago
      True, once my libraries get bigger than five or six assembly instructions, I tend to break them down to a more manageable size.
    - always_good 9y ago
      May be. Meanwhile real-world non-trivial projects tend to be large projects. Nice to be prepared for that instead of gambling on "surely we'll extract out smaller projects that fall on the right abstraction boundaries in the face of unknown future requirements."
  - ubernostrum 9y ago
    Personally I'd only use a language like C or C++ or Java for a tiny puny baby child's toy program. They're fundamentally unfit for real-world codebases.
    - KMag 9y ago
      I'm probably being trolled, but I'll bite. How big are the "real-world codebases" you're talking about, and how many programmers are working on the code? Once you hit 5-10 million lines of code and/or thousands of developers, static typing really helps manage complexity.
      - ubernostrum 9y ago
        It's more that I get tired of this argument and decided to try to pre-emptively spoil it.
- naasking 9y ago
  > Unit tests is the only truth that matters, static typing or not. Well that's provably false, because there exist properties that you can type check that literally can't be verified via unit tests, even in principle. For instance, race and deadlock freedom.
- tome 9y ago
  > Static typing is a hindrance in front of refactoring. Are you kidding? Python programming's my day job but Haskell is an order of magnitude easier to refactor.

amirouche 9y ago

I agree that static typing helps reading comprehension and that IDEs like pycharm help getting into big code bases, that said, at the end of the day, when you know the code both the IDE and static typing are getting in the way. Actually, I never saw anybody as quick as people using simple editors like emacs and vim. GUI is getting in the way of the programmers intent. Static typing is a hindrance in front of refactoring. Unit tests is the only truth that matters, static typing or not.

always_good 9y ago
You're kinda damning it with faint praise when you say that you can use dynamically typed languages on small projects that fit in your head (and are also probably written by a single developer). You can pretty much use any language in that scenario. But the chickens come to roost around day 30+ or so.
- icebraining 9y ago
  A large project is a poorly decoupled set of small projects.
  - orthecreedence 9y ago
    True, once my libraries get bigger than five or six assembly instructions, I tend to break them down to a more manageable size.
  - always_good 9y ago
    May be. Meanwhile real-world non-trivial projects tend to be large projects. Nice to be prepared for that instead of gambling on "surely we'll extract out smaller projects that fall on the right abstraction boundaries in the face of unknown future requirements."
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  Personally I'd only use a language like C or C++ or Java for a tiny puny baby child's toy program. They're fundamentally unfit for real-world codebases.
  - KMag 9y ago
    I'm probably being trolled, but I'll bite. How big are the "real-world codebases" you're talking about, and how many programmers are working on the code? Once you hit 5-10 million lines of code and/or thousands of developers, static typing really helps manage complexity.
    - ubernostrum 9y ago
      It's more that I get tired of this argument and decided to try to pre-emptively spoil it.
naasking 9y ago
> Unit tests is the only truth that matters, static typing or not. Well that's provably false, because there exist properties that you can type check that literally can't be verified via unit tests, even in principle. For instance, race and deadlock freedom.
tome 9y ago
> Static typing is a hindrance in front of refactoring. Are you kidding? Python programming's my day job but Haskell is an order of magnitude easier to refactor.