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This comment and many others in this thread seem to be missing something. I see a lot of anger here or blame on the author for deliberately choosing to not use

This comment and many others in this thread seem to be missing something. I see a lot of anger here or blame on the author for deliberately choosing to not use types, but I think the author actually does a very admirable job explaining what's going on in their head: "... concepts like Generics felt very hard to understand ... every piece of code is strongly typed and overwhelming. Even simple code like below scared me ..." The author isn't claiming to have had an informed opinion of types. They're saying that they found learning about types to be difficult and stressful. That's a real problem that I think people who understand types forget. > specifying your types is about as low-hanging, basic a step as you can take. No, absolutely not. Learning an entirely new syntax, static semantics, and entire way of reasoning about code is about as high-hanging as you can get. Sure, once you know how to use static types, applying that knowledge is fairly easy. But it's a big mountain to climb before you get to do that. This is the key advantage of dynamic types. You can make a computer do useful things without having to invest the large effort required to learn how static types work. Now, personally, I think it is worth learning that. And, certainly, once you learn it, you get to amortize that benefit through the rest of your career. But there's a lot of people standing at the base of the mountain, realizing only how far they have to climb with no idea of the view they'll have once they're up there. Those people deserve sympathy, understanding, and encouragement to climb. Not criticism and mockery like I see all over this thread.

mdoms 6y ago
> They're saying that they found learning about types to be difficult and stressful No, they're saying that types (which they don't understand) are "over-engineering". This is, frankly, not acceptable to me.
- jolux 6y ago
  They're describing how they felt before learning about types.
  - mdoms 6y ago
    Yes. Like I said. > I'm glad the author was able to move on from this, but it is utterly pervasive in some parts of our industry.
    - eyelidlessness 6y ago
      It's entirely possible you have a language barrier, but you should know that there's a meaningful difference between past and present tense when you're representing what other people said. (Edit: added clarification of which speaker's tense was important)
spideymans 6y ago
>The author isn't claiming to have had an informed opinion of types. They're saying that they found learning about types to be difficult and stressful. That's a real problem that I think people who understand types forget. I don't understand how one can be a great (or even half-decent) SWE with such an aversion to learning something so common and foundational as types.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  After working in the industry for many years, I have aversions to learning many things. Usually, it's clearly a failed recycled idea with a small twist, poor approach to a problem, or someone selling new shiny. I have no aversion to learning something when it shows potential value, but you must explain the value without gimmicks. Maybe typing hasn't been well sold to this person. The new thing I learn should make my life easier, not harder. If you don't apply a filter, cargo cult and marketing nonsense will sweep you away in a world hidden in unnecessary complexity to make a few bucks. If learning and using something new adds more stress and difficulty and little-to-no benefit than life without it, I'll pass. When it comes to typing... I don't think that's the case. Typing can be annoying when you first use it (I'm sure I complained a lot) but it's well worth it when you need a stable maintainable codebase.
  - johnbotris 6y ago
    I get your point, but I think it's misplaced. Types are not new, in fact from a CS perspective they are very old. I think it's a shame that learning about (even just basic) types is being taught as some new thing that can help to make your code better, rather one of the fundamentals that we should be learning from the beginning, which can still provide benefits even when writing in dynamically typed languages. Perhaps it's just a case of bad marketing and lazy educators.
- munificent 6y ago
  I'd be willing to bet money that if you were to list all your skills and non-skills, I could find at least one thing that you don't know that other SWEs would consider just as "common and foundational". Could be any of: data structures and algorithms, complexity analysis, operating systems, parsing, compilers, databases, networking, user interface programming, OOP, FP, MVC, markup languages, the web, graphics, manual memory management, pointers, computer architecture, etc.
spideymans 6y ago
>The author isn't claiming to have had an informed opinion of types. They're saying that they found learning about types to be difficult and stressful. That's a real problem that I think people who understand types forget. Respectfully, its really hard for me to wrap my head around this mindset. When I wrote my first line of code, almost 10 years ago, one of the very first concepts I learned was types. You know the basic OOP lessons where they teach that a Dog is a type of Mammal which is a type of Animal, etc. Typing was ingrained in me before I wrote any meaningful code. So from my perspective (and the perspective of anyone who learned similarly), typing is basic, foundational knowledge, and programming without an understanding of types is akin to running before you can walk I think a lot of the developers learning nowadays are learning to code only on JS. And on JS you can do a lot without ever thinking about types. So they get stuck in the mentality that typing isn't necessary, and don't ever put in the effort to learn types. Learning about types isn't that hard. But if you've been conditioned into thinking that typing is esoteric (perhaps due to modern coding courses completely glazing over types), then you're likely going to find it very challenging.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  A move at my alma mater to switch the introductory course from Java to Python was criticized on the same grounds. The students had a hard time in successive levels of coursework. It seems to be a lot harder to get people who learn dynamic typing first to learn static typing, than the other way around.
  - slaymaker1907 6y ago
    It's dangerous to assume that the same number of people will continue programming if you start people on dynamic vs static typing. Maybe the static first programs weed out more people?
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      The anecdotal information I heard was that in general there were less people adjusting to later coursework successfully, in absolute numbers. From a pedagogical standpoint, if the point of an undergrad education was to produce people with well-rounded abilities in their field, I don't know that switching introductory courses to Python was the best move. Personally, I'm thankful that the first program I was enrolled in allowed me to "fail" fast, so that I quickly figured out that I shouldn't really waste more time and energy into the program and switched into CS. It's a lot easier to pivot as a freshman in your second semester than as a junior finishing the academic year. (And I knew people who took that long to switch majors, who either spent way more time and money or dropped out.)
rowanG077 6y ago
This is wrong. Dynamically typed languages still have types that need to be understood by the developer. They are only checked at runtime and not at compile time.
- munificent 6y ago
  Values have types, but variables do not. All programmers have to think about the former, but only statically typed programmers need to reason about the latter.
akiselev 6y ago
> This comment and many others in this thread seem to be missing something. I think they're also shoehorning their experiences. Some coders are cogs in giant tech companies that emphasize code quality, others are on teams in large business in an unrelated field, others are solo hobbyists, and still others are the only tech guys at their medium or small business. Some write code to run a business, others write code to probe the mysteries of the universe. Some write life or death firmware that'll survive for decades, others create landing or promo pages that will be deleted next month and are subject to the whims of the marketing department. Those are all vastly different contexts for a programmer and each requires its own set of trade offs vis a vis typing. For example, I couldn't care less about strong vs weak or static vs dynamic typing at my current frontend job because the stakeholders don't know what they want, stuff changes rapidly, and there's little I can reuse from one request to the other but I was a full blown static typing crusader at my last job where I worked on a payment system that had to deal with schizophrenic regulations.
- kelnos 6y ago
  > I think they're also shoehorning their experiences. Yup, agreed. I first learned to program in the late 80s (when I was around 7 or 8 years old) using BASIC, and my first part-time programming job in college was a mix of C and Java. All of my EE and CS programming coursework was done in C, C++, or (pre-generics!) Java. It is really hard for me to put my feet in the shoes of someone who switched careers in their 20s or 30s by joining a bootcamp that teaches node, HTML, and CSS, and helps them find web dev jobs. Their journey is so different from mine that I have very little ability to guess as to what should be easy or hard for them to do as they grow in their career. Having said that, I still do believe that everyone who wants to write code should learn about static typing eventually, and the sooner they're introduced to the concept, the easier it will be for them to integrate it into their mental model of how software works.
  - codeOnMaster 6y ago
    I switched careers at 33 (currently 35) from structural engineering to a full stack JS career after attending a bootcamp. Reading your comment, I wish I was in the former group of learning to code early on, taking CS and SE courses in university, etc... I work feverishly to learn as much as I possibly can about networking, Linux, hardware, SQL, etc.. along with all the JS related topics I need to learn for my job. I just wanted to add to the conversation by saying that there are people in the later group who really want to become well rounded and not just be JS developers.
kelnos 6y ago
Not the parent, but I think it's possible to simultaneously believe two things: 1) It is completely understandable that, considering how easy it is to for a new programmer to get started in a dynamically-typed language (and that those languages are pushed very hard as beginner-friendly), many developers have a hard time grasping the idea of static typing and how to apply it to code, because their mental model just never included that, and changing mental models is hard for everyone. 2) It is absolutely horrifying that this is the state of new-developer education (or the lack thereof) in our industry, and I would put this on the (long) list of reasons why software in general is so unreliable. I give the OP a lot of credit for writing about his journey, and by doing so making himself vulnerable to criticism. And it makes me really happy that he was able to not only eventually see the benefits of typing, but concretely articulate some of the benefits he found helpful[0]. That, IMO, is a sign of a solid developer who is willing to expand his skills and change his mind when given new information. But from a structural standpoint, I wish he had better mentorship when he started out and had never fallen into the "typing is bad" camp in the first place. [0] "Making impossible states impossible" is something that I sometimes still struggle to impress upon developers with years of experience under their belts. The compiler is there to help you and catch your mistakes before you even check in the code, if you give the type system enough information to do so.
- mewpmewp2 6y ago
  In the end, and in the big picture scheme of things, what is programming about? It's about providing value. There are plenty of systems and tech built that do not use types, yet they do provide value. And those systems may seem horrific to you, but none the less they provide value. These systems were built by hacking/mashing things together, but the fact that they work, still remains. You might hate for example WordPress, but it powers tons of web and those websites might not exist if it wasn't for WordPress. Imagine a case where you can start to be productive with WordPress within few months, but if you were to learn the whole thing, it might take few years, the value provided would be a lot lower. I went 4-5 years of my career without knowing anything about types, yet I believe I was able to provide software that benefitted the world. It's not that black and white.
neolog 6y ago
> This is the key advantage of dynamic types. You can make a computer do useful things without having to invest the large effort required to learn how static types work. That's one key advantage of dynamic types, but it's not the only one. Sophisticated dynamic type systems like Julia's are difficult to model statically. Some idioms would require dependent types if they're even possible at all.
- djur 6y ago
  Yes, there's historically been cases for dynamic typing that went beyond "writing type annotations is hard", although as time has progressed, computers have gotten faster, and compilers have gotten better, the scope has gotten smaller and smaller. (I think a language in Python's niche that was created today would have a simple type system with extensive inference, just because someone developing such a language today would find it technically feasible.) Another case is what Alan Kay calls "extreme late binding" in a messaging-oriented language, as seen in Smalltalk and Erlang.
  - pansa2 6y ago
    > I think a language in Python's niche that was created today would have a simple type system with extensive inference How do you think a “simple type system”, suitable for a Python-like language, would look? The type systems that have been developed for Python itself, for example MyPy, are far from simple.
mantap 6y ago
Around the world millions of people learn Java as their first programming language. It is not hard to learn how to use types or generics. What appears to be difficult is to go from an untyped language to a statically typed one. Which is why everybody should start with a statically typed language so that the psychological barrier never develops.
eyelidlessness 6y ago
> a very admirable job explaining what's going on in their head As someone who followed the author's path, this is spot on, and also what I recognized in the article. Everything else you said is spot on too, I just wanted to call this out as part of the article's would-be audience.

mdoms 6y ago

> They're saying that they found learning about types to be difficult and stressful No, they're saying that types (which they don't understand) are "over-engineering". This is, frankly, not acceptable to me.

jolux 6y ago
They're describing how they felt before learning about types.
- mdoms 6y ago
  Yes. Like I said. > I'm glad the author was able to move on from this, but it is utterly pervasive in some parts of our industry.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    It's entirely possible you have a language barrier, but you should know that there's a meaningful difference between past and present tense when you're representing what other people said. (Edit: added clarification of which speaker's tense was important)

spideymans 6y ago

>The author isn't claiming to have had an informed opinion of types. They're saying that they found learning about types to be difficult and stressful. That's a real problem that I think people who understand types forget. I don't understand how one can be a great (or even half-decent) SWE with such an aversion to learning something so common and foundational as types.

Frost1x 6y ago
After working in the industry for many years, I have aversions to learning many things. Usually, it's clearly a failed recycled idea with a small twist, poor approach to a problem, or someone selling new shiny. I have no aversion to learning something when it shows potential value, but you must explain the value without gimmicks. Maybe typing hasn't been well sold to this person. The new thing I learn should make my life easier, not harder. If you don't apply a filter, cargo cult and marketing nonsense will sweep you away in a world hidden in unnecessary complexity to make a few bucks. If learning and using something new adds more stress and difficulty and little-to-no benefit than life without it, I'll pass. When it comes to typing... I don't think that's the case. Typing can be annoying when you first use it (I'm sure I complained a lot) but it's well worth it when you need a stable maintainable codebase.
- johnbotris 6y ago
  I get your point, but I think it's misplaced. Types are not new, in fact from a CS perspective they are very old. I think it's a shame that learning about (even just basic) types is being taught as some new thing that can help to make your code better, rather one of the fundamentals that we should be learning from the beginning, which can still provide benefits even when writing in dynamically typed languages. Perhaps it's just a case of bad marketing and lazy educators.
munificent 6y ago
I'd be willing to bet money that if you were to list all your skills and non-skills, I could find at least one thing that you don't know that other SWEs would consider just as "common and foundational". Could be any of: data structures and algorithms, complexity analysis, operating systems, parsing, compilers, databases, networking, user interface programming, OOP, FP, MVC, markup languages, the web, graphics, manual memory management, pointers, computer architecture, etc.

spideymans 6y ago

>The author isn't claiming to have had an informed opinion of types. They're saying that they found learning about types to be difficult and stressful. That's a real problem that I think people who understand types forget. Respectfully, its really hard for me to wrap my head around this mindset. When I wrote my first line of code, almost 10 years ago, one of the very first concepts I learned was types. You know the basic OOP lessons where they teach that a Dog is a type of Mammal which is a type of Animal, etc. Typing was ingrained in me before I wrote any meaningful code. So from my perspective (and the perspective of anyone who learned similarly), typing is basic, foundational knowledge, and programming without an understanding of types is akin to running before you can walk I think a lot of the developers learning nowadays are learning to code only on JS. And on JS you can do a lot without ever thinking about types. So they get stuck in the mentality that typing isn't necessary, and don't ever put in the effort to learn types. Learning about types isn't that hard. But if you've been conditioned into thinking that typing is esoteric (perhaps due to modern coding courses completely glazing over types), then you're likely going to find it very challenging.

bobthepanda 6y ago
A move at my alma mater to switch the introductory course from Java to Python was criticized on the same grounds. The students had a hard time in successive levels of coursework. It seems to be a lot harder to get people who learn dynamic typing first to learn static typing, than the other way around.
- slaymaker1907 6y ago
  It's dangerous to assume that the same number of people will continue programming if you start people on dynamic vs static typing. Maybe the static first programs weed out more people?
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    The anecdotal information I heard was that in general there were less people adjusting to later coursework successfully, in absolute numbers. From a pedagogical standpoint, if the point of an undergrad education was to produce people with well-rounded abilities in their field, I don't know that switching introductory courses to Python was the best move. Personally, I'm thankful that the first program I was enrolled in allowed me to "fail" fast, so that I quickly figured out that I shouldn't really waste more time and energy into the program and switched into CS. It's a lot easier to pivot as a freshman in your second semester than as a junior finishing the academic year. (And I knew people who took that long to switch majors, who either spent way more time and money or dropped out.)

rowanG077 6y ago

This is wrong. Dynamically typed languages still have types that need to be understood by the developer. They are only checked at runtime and not at compile time.

munificent 6y ago
Values have types, but variables do not. All programmers have to think about the former, but only statically typed programmers need to reason about the latter.

akiselev 6y ago

> This comment and many others in this thread seem to be missing something. I think they're also shoehorning their experiences. Some coders are cogs in giant tech companies that emphasize code quality, others are on teams in large business in an unrelated field, others are solo hobbyists, and still others are the only tech guys at their medium or small business. Some write code to run a business, others write code to probe the mysteries of the universe. Some write life or death firmware that'll survive for decades, others create landing or promo pages that will be deleted next month and are subject to the whims of the marketing department. Those are all vastly different contexts for a programmer and each requires its own set of trade offs vis a vis typing. For example, I couldn't care less about strong vs weak or static vs dynamic typing at my current frontend job because the stakeholders don't know what they want, stuff changes rapidly, and there's little I can reuse from one request to the other but I was a full blown static typing crusader at my last job where I worked on a payment system that had to deal with schizophrenic regulations.

kelnos 6y ago
> I think they're also shoehorning their experiences. Yup, agreed. I first learned to program in the late 80s (when I was around 7 or 8 years old) using BASIC, and my first part-time programming job in college was a mix of C and Java. All of my EE and CS programming coursework was done in C, C++, or (pre-generics!) Java. It is really hard for me to put my feet in the shoes of someone who switched careers in their 20s or 30s by joining a bootcamp that teaches node, HTML, and CSS, and helps them find web dev jobs. Their journey is so different from mine that I have very little ability to guess as to what should be easy or hard for them to do as they grow in their career. Having said that, I still do believe that everyone who wants to write code should learn about static typing eventually, and the sooner they're introduced to the concept, the easier it will be for them to integrate it into their mental model of how software works.
- codeOnMaster 6y ago
  I switched careers at 33 (currently 35) from structural engineering to a full stack JS career after attending a bootcamp. Reading your comment, I wish I was in the former group of learning to code early on, taking CS and SE courses in university, etc... I work feverishly to learn as much as I possibly can about networking, Linux, hardware, SQL, etc.. along with all the JS related topics I need to learn for my job. I just wanted to add to the conversation by saying that there are people in the later group who really want to become well rounded and not just be JS developers.

kelnos 6y ago

Not the parent, but I think it's possible to simultaneously believe two things: 1) It is completely understandable that, considering how easy it is to for a new programmer to get started in a dynamically-typed language (and that those languages are pushed very hard as beginner-friendly), many developers have a hard time grasping the idea of static typing and how to apply it to code, because their mental model just never included that, and changing mental models is hard for everyone. 2) It is absolutely horrifying that this is the state of new-developer education (or the lack thereof) in our industry, and I would put this on the (long) list of reasons why software in general is so unreliable. I give the OP a lot of credit for writing about his journey, and by doing so making himself vulnerable to criticism. And it makes me really happy that he was able to not only eventually see the benefits of typing, but concretely articulate some of the benefits he found helpful[0]. That, IMO, is a sign of a solid developer who is willing to expand his skills and change his mind when given new information. But from a structural standpoint, I wish he had better mentorship when he started out and had never fallen into the "typing is bad" camp in the first place. [0] "Making impossible states impossible" is something that I sometimes still struggle to impress upon developers with years of experience under their belts. The compiler is there to help you and catch your mistakes before you even check in the code, if you give the type system enough information to do so.

mewpmewp2 6y ago
In the end, and in the big picture scheme of things, what is programming about? It's about providing value. There are plenty of systems and tech built that do not use types, yet they do provide value. And those systems may seem horrific to you, but none the less they provide value. These systems were built by hacking/mashing things together, but the fact that they work, still remains. You might hate for example WordPress, but it powers tons of web and those websites might not exist if it wasn't for WordPress. Imagine a case where you can start to be productive with WordPress within few months, but if you were to learn the whole thing, it might take few years, the value provided would be a lot lower. I went 4-5 years of my career without knowing anything about types, yet I believe I was able to provide software that benefitted the world. It's not that black and white.

neolog 6y ago

> This is the key advantage of dynamic types. You can make a computer do useful things without having to invest the large effort required to learn how static types work. That's one key advantage of dynamic types, but it's not the only one. Sophisticated dynamic type systems like Julia's are difficult to model statically. Some idioms would require dependent types if they're even possible at all.

djur 6y ago
Yes, there's historically been cases for dynamic typing that went beyond "writing type annotations is hard", although as time has progressed, computers have gotten faster, and compilers have gotten better, the scope has gotten smaller and smaller. (I think a language in Python's niche that was created today would have a simple type system with extensive inference, just because someone developing such a language today would find it technically feasible.) Another case is what Alan Kay calls "extreme late binding" in a messaging-oriented language, as seen in Smalltalk and Erlang.
- pansa2 6y ago
  > I think a language in Python's niche that was created today would have a simple type system with extensive inference How do you think a “simple type system”, suitable for a Python-like language, would look? The type systems that have been developed for Python itself, for example MyPy, are far from simple.

mantap 6y ago

Around the world millions of people learn Java as their first programming language. It is not hard to learn how to use types or generics. What appears to be difficult is to go from an untyped language to a statically typed one. Which is why everybody should start with a statically typed language so that the psychological barrier never develops.

eyelidlessness 6y ago

> a very admirable job explaining what's going on in their head As someone who followed the author's path, this is spot on, and also what I recognized in the article. Everything else you said is spot on too, I just wanted to call this out as part of the article's would-be audience.