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> Every codebase you have ever worked with is typed. You've baked your conclusion into your argument. But by this logic, sure, everything is typed. I'll buy it

> Every codebase you have ever worked with is typed. You've baked your conclusion into your argument. But by this logic, sure, everything is typed. I'll buy it. A static type system just makes you explicitly type it out for every single thing and again for every single thing that might operate on that first thing. It's pedantic, filled with boilerplate, and plenty of promises about problems the system solved that were just invisible before. Hmm...those might be the marks of snake oil, now aren't they? Consider a iron foundry. Are there type checks on the iron? No, the entire process is duck-typing. Why? Because that's how reality works. You can specially shape your iron ingots to key into your foundry. What's that? Duck typing. The firing profile will follow certain characteristics. Did it get those characteristics from the ingot? No, it duck types it and starts firing it as if its iron. If it isn't iron, the process will throw an exception. And that part has all sorts of safety checks around it. The most you can do would be some type of chemical check on the ingot before starting. Almost like a typecheck before proceeding in a method. Aristotelian vs. Platonic approaches. The problem with the Platonic approach is that it requires you to be an oracle. Static typing is like trying to encode logic at the molecular level. This atom WILL NOT bond this atom. I mean, sure, it can work...but there's a lot of atoms and a lot of interactions. Don't define what you don't need.

phailhaus 6y ago
> Are there type checks on the iron? Yes there are, it's called physics haha. The iron foundry analogy is not great imo. Programming is more akin to building an engine, but also building the tools that are used to make that engine. Because of the physical nature of these tools, you get a simple static type system by default: you cannot put a screw into a hole not meant for the screw with that thread. Now imagine you didn't have this guarantee. Any tool could technically be put anywhere, and you wouldn't know you had it wrong until you ran it and it killed you. Or even worse, it seems to run fine until you go over a bump, then it kills you. That's duck typing without a type system. And god forbid you need to add more engineers to your engine project. Nothing is documented, and they have to infer the properties of the tools based on how they are used today.
- musingsole 6y ago
  > it seems to run fine until you go over a bump, then it kills you That's half of duck-typing. You're missing the exception response where safety is enforced. A static type system fails with the wrong type. A duck-typed system responds with something as sensible as it can reason with what it was handed. Must often, that's a hard failure because most code is brittle and doesn't need the robustness (i.e. don't build what you aren't going to need).

phailhaus 6y ago

> Are there type checks on the iron? Yes there are, it's called physics haha. The iron foundry analogy is not great imo. Programming is more akin to building an engine, but also building the tools that are used to make that engine. Because of the physical nature of these tools, you get a simple static type system by default: you cannot put a screw into a hole not meant for the screw with that thread. Now imagine you didn't have this guarantee. Any tool could technically be put anywhere, and you wouldn't know you had it wrong until you ran it and it killed you. Or even worse, it seems to run fine until you go over a bump, then it kills you. That's duck typing without a type system. And god forbid you need to add more engineers to your engine project. Nothing is documented, and they have to infer the properties of the tools based on how they are used today.

musingsole 6y ago
> it seems to run fine until you go over a bump, then it kills you That's half of duck-typing. You're missing the exception response where safety is enforced. A static type system fails with the wrong type. A duck-typed system responds with something as sensible as it can reason with what it was handed. Must often, that's a hard failure because most code is brittle and doesn't need the robustness (i.e. don't build what you aren't going to need).