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No I haven't. And, depending on how long life turns out to be, maybe I'll get to. But. I have built plenty of large software systems. And the source of cost i

No I haven't. And, depending on how long life turns out to be, maybe I'll get to. But. I have built plenty of large software systems. And the source of cost in those systems is always -- by at least a factor of a 100 -- was coupling and imprecise semantics. These two problems are a function of the experience and training (and value system) of the programmer building them, and programming languages can do very little to save a system from these plights. (It might be that a static programming language can help here inasmuch as it slows down the programmer from producing too much code, but I realize that's arguable and also that I'm making a wicked joke.) Still. All computers ask is for semantic precision and you don't need a static type verification to get precision. So clearly static type verification is unnecessary for producing programs that work. And clearly statically-typed everywhere PLs are asking the programmer to do extra work. That's prima facie true. So the burden is really on the MLer/Haskeller to prove that that extra work is giving overall delivery throughput to the programming team. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But I'm waiting for the clearly thought out justification. Haven't heard it yet.

wtetzner 9y ago
> And clearly statically-typed everywhere PLs are asking the programmer to do extra work. I'm not convinced this is entirely true. The kinds of information that you encode in types is the kind of information that's useful to anyone reading the code. And if that information isn't written down somewhere, then the person reading the code (maybe you sometime later) has to reconstruct it themselves. And if it's useful to write that kind of information down, why not have the computer check that it's consistent?
Tehnix 9y ago
> All computers ask is for semantic precision and you don't need a static type verification to get precision. So clearly static type verification is unnecessary for producing programs that work That's a bit contrived. No matter which language you write in, at some step a type check will happen. For dynamic types its at runtime and for static types its at compile time. > And clearly statically-typed everywhere PLs are asking the programmer to do extra work. That's prima facie true. So the burden is really on the MLer/Haskeller to prove that that extra work is giving overall delivery throughput to the programming team. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But I'm waiting for the clearly thought out justification. Haven't heard it yet. Here are just a few of the real world accounts of using Haskell in production, you can check out: - The Joy and Agony of Haskell in Production: http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/production.html http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/production.html - Haskell is Not For Production and Other Tales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlTO510zO78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlTO510zO78 - Production Haskell - Reid Draper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZQLkkDXy68 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZQLkkDXy68 If these didn't convince you, there are tons of Haskellers that will attest that the type system in the long run has quite substantial benefits.
tome 9y ago
> I have built plenty of large software systems. And the source of cost in those systems is always -- by at least a factor of a 100 -- was coupling and imprecise semantics. This is a wonderfully, astonishingly, gobsmackingly interesting comment for me to read! In my experience of large systems (Haskell-style) types are exactly the thing you need to tame coupling and imprecise semantics. To take one arbitrary but notable example, in a previous job we found several bugs in large industry XML schema^ by converting the schema to Haskell types and noticing, via type errors, that some things didn't match up. ^I forget if the bugs were in the schema itself or in the Java implementation that another team was using. I think a little bit of the former and a lot of the latter.
wtetzner 9y ago
> I have built plenty of large software systems. And the source of cost in those systems is always -- by at least a factor of a 100 -- was coupling and imprecise semantics. One thing I find interesting about this is that a good type system, combined with something like OCaml's module system, is that you can force decoupling. In OCaml, you can create an abstract type, which cannot be used in any way that isn't specified through the interface. You don't have to wrap the runtime value in anything, it's purely a compile time abstraction.

wtetzner 9y ago

> And clearly statically-typed everywhere PLs are asking the programmer to do extra work. I'm not convinced this is entirely true. The kinds of information that you encode in types is the kind of information that's useful to anyone reading the code. And if that information isn't written down somewhere, then the person reading the code (maybe you sometime later) has to reconstruct it themselves. And if it's useful to write that kind of information down, why not have the computer check that it's consistent?

Tehnix 9y ago

> All computers ask is for semantic precision and you don't need a static type verification to get precision. So clearly static type verification is unnecessary for producing programs that work That's a bit contrived. No matter which language you write in, at some step a type check will happen. For dynamic types its at runtime and for static types its at compile time. > And clearly statically-typed everywhere PLs are asking the programmer to do extra work. That's prima facie true. So the burden is really on the MLer/Haskeller to prove that that extra work is giving overall delivery throughput to the programming team. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But I'm waiting for the clearly thought out justification. Haven't heard it yet. Here are just a few of the real world accounts of using Haskell in production, you can check out: - The Joy and Agony of Haskell in Production: http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/production.html http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/production.html - Haskell is Not For Production and Other Tales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlTO510zO78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlTO510zO78 - Production Haskell - Reid Draper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZQLkkDXy68 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZQLkkDXy68 If these didn't convince you, there are tons of Haskellers that will attest that the type system in the long run has quite substantial benefits.

tome 9y ago

> I have built plenty of large software systems. And the source of cost in those systems is always -- by at least a factor of a 100 -- was coupling and imprecise semantics. This is a wonderfully, astonishingly, gobsmackingly interesting comment for me to read! In my experience of large systems (Haskell-style) types are exactly the thing you need to tame coupling and imprecise semantics. To take one arbitrary but notable example, in a previous job we found several bugs in large industry XML schema^ by converting the schema to Haskell types and noticing, via type errors, that some things didn't match up. ^I forget if the bugs were in the schema itself or in the Java implementation that another team was using. I think a little bit of the former and a lot of the latter.

wtetzner 9y ago

> I have built plenty of large software systems. And the source of cost in those systems is always -- by at least a factor of a 100 -- was coupling and imprecise semantics. One thing I find interesting about this is that a good type system, combined with something like OCaml's module system, is that you can force decoupling. In OCaml, you can create an abstract type, which cannot be used in any way that isn't specified through the interface. You don't have to wrap the runtime value in anything, it's purely a compile time abstraction.