5 ms·

My thought experiment is this: take a simple, single page app that take user information, runs some calculation, and returns the results. Add login/SSO/or what

by wespiser_2018 8y ago

My thought experiment is this: take a simple, single page app that take user information, runs some calculation, and returns the results. Add login/SSO/or what ever third-party integration. It will be faster to bring value to your customers using a dynamic language (Ruby/Python/PhP), then using (Haskell/Scala). I don't think you really see the benefits of Hindley-Miller type inference, unless you are building complex services (think: compilers, real-time allocation services) that require multiple layers of domain specific abstraction. Advantages of using strongly typed languages for simple SaaS often doesn't hold, and there are very few, if any? successful SaaS start ups that have taken this route. I just think not moving fast enough will kill your start up before you ever get to the point of having to worry about 'tech debt' Note: This could also be true for programming tooling/environmental reasons, and strongly typed languages do help smaller teams handle larger codebases/reduce tests!

chriswarbo 8y ago
Again, I haven't seen robust evidence either way about development speed, and any such anecdata will have an equivalent from the other side. One clear failure of dynamic types for Web programming is injection attacks, which are trivially solved by treating HTML, SQL, etc. as separate types (e.g. http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2006-10-18-a-type-based-solution-to-the-strings-problem.html http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2006-10-18-a-type-based-soluti... )
erdeszt 8y ago
> It will be faster to bring value to your customers using a dynamic language (Ruby/Python/PhP), then using (Haskell/Scala). If we are talking about a first iteration/mvp then I can agree with you. On the other once you have to maintain/extend/refactor this first iteration you'll start seeing the (imo) enormous benefits of static typing.

chriswarbo 8y ago

Again, I haven't seen robust evidence either way about development speed, and any such anecdata will have an equivalent from the other side. One clear failure of dynamic types for Web programming is injection attacks, which are trivially solved by treating HTML, SQL, etc. as separate types (e.g. http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2006-10-18-a-type-based-solution-to-the-strings-problem.html http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2006-10-18-a-type-based-soluti... )

erdeszt 8y ago

> It will be faster to bring value to your customers using a dynamic language (Ruby/Python/PhP), then using (Haskell/Scala). If we are talking about a first iteration/mvp then I can agree with you. On the other once you have to maintain/extend/refactor this first iteration you'll start seeing the (imo) enormous benefits of static typing.