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> it’s equally true that extremely strict type systems require a lot more upfront and the law of diminishing returns applies to type strictness - a cogent answe

> it’s equally true that extremely strict type systems require a lot more upfront and the law of diminishing returns applies to type strictness - a cogent answer to the question “why is so little software written in haskell?“ I was with the article up until that point. I don't agree that diminishing returns with regards to type strictness applies linearly. Term-level Haskell is not massively harder than writing most equivalent code in JavaScript — in fact I'd say it's easier and you reap greater benefit. Perhaps it's a different story when you go all-in on type-level programming, but I'm not sure that's what the author was getting at. This smells of the Middle Ground logical fallacy to me. Or of course the comment was tongue-in-cheek and I'm overreacting.

choeger 6y ago
That law of diminishing returns might actually apply, I am not 100% sure. But more powerful type systems allow for the more complex composition of more complex interfaces in a safe manner. Think of higher-level modules and data structures. Or dependent types and input handling. Or linear types and resource handling.
samvher 6y ago
I agree. I would say that Erlang goes ~80% of the way compared to Haskell's type system and the last 20% really matter, to the point that in many cases I find myself not really using Erlang's (optional) type system at all. Better type coverage and more descriptive types allow the compiler to infer more and I'd say this is the opposite of diminishing returns.
7952 6y ago
I had to rewrite some JavaScript code in Postgres recently that measured the overlap between different elevation ranges. In JS I had to write it myself and deal with the edge cases and bugs. In Postgres I just use the range type and some operators. It was brilliant in comparison. The tiny effort of learning it was worth it. The list of data types I use all the time is bigger than just string, numbers and booleans. Serialisation formats should support them. Particularly as there are often text format standards that already exist for a lot of them. Give me wkt geometry and iso formatted dates. It's not that difficult and totally with it.

choeger 6y ago

That law of diminishing returns might actually apply, I am not 100% sure. But more powerful type systems allow for the more complex composition of more complex interfaces in a safe manner. Think of higher-level modules and data structures. Or dependent types and input handling. Or linear types and resource handling.

samvher 6y ago

I agree. I would say that Erlang goes ~80% of the way compared to Haskell's type system and the last 20% really matter, to the point that in many cases I find myself not really using Erlang's (optional) type system at all. Better type coverage and more descriptive types allow the compiler to infer more and I'd say this is the opposite of diminishing returns.

7952 6y ago

I had to rewrite some JavaScript code in Postgres recently that measured the overlap between different elevation ranges. In JS I had to write it myself and deal with the edge cases and bugs. In Postgres I just use the range type and some operators. It was brilliant in comparison. The tiny effort of learning it was worth it. The list of data types I use all the time is bigger than just string, numbers and booleans. Serialisation formats should support them. Particularly as there are often text format standards that already exist for a lot of them. Give me wkt geometry and iso formatted dates. It's not that difficult and totally with it.