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2012: “static types restrict my beautiful code” 2019: “static types are amazing!” I’m still salty about this shift. No one really goes back and admits, “maybe
by mattgreenrocks 6y ago
2012: “static types restrict my beautiful code”
2019: “static types are amazing!”
I’m still salty about this shift. No one really goes back and admits, “maybe we were all wrong.”
IMO, the best explanation is the high influx of new, young devs results in ideological conformity in lieu of developed aesthetics. This also explains the unnatural amount of sway by so-called “thought leaders.”
- nthj 6y agoMore complicated functionality has moved to integrations/APIs in the past 8 years. When you’re trying to ship an extensive application and building out features that few customers may ever use, types absolutely slow you down. When you’re integrating with a 3rd-party API, you have two differences: 1. relatively high confidence the API won’t change much, which makes implementing typed code lower risk and higher ROI 2. a slower feedback loop over the “reload the page” of rolling your own, so types catching issues earlier than heavy integration tests is much more valuable I use untyped Ruby/Rails code for all of the CRUD, and golang AWS lambdas for anything integrating with SDKs/APIs. Best of both worlds, in my experience.
- the_arun 6y agoI think one size doesn’t fit all. Some engineers like static types & some don’t. People who want it will work on adding it. I don’t think same people who disliked earlier changed their mind.
- chrismeller 6y agoAbsolutely. “Anyone can write JavaScript” led to that crap. It also led to having modules that do things like determine if a number is even or odd and get exploited.
- zdragnar 6y agoEarlier versions of typescript definitely were far more restrictive than recent ones- changes / updates to unions, enums, generics and inference, etc. There are still some areas where it falls flat, but it is far more usable than before (very pleasant, in fact).
- mattgreenrocks 6y agoAgree. Been using TS + Svelte on a side project and it has been very nice. I say this as someone who runs screaming from webdev usually.