3 ms·

Static typing is net 0 cost. We don't need to be "honest" static typing is obviously not free you need to think of types. The real revelation was that the cost

Static typing is net 0 cost. We don't need to be "honest" static typing is obviously not free you need to think of types. The real revelation was that the cost of dynamic languages far exceeds the cost of a statically typed language.

bb88 5y ago
You're not wrong, but yet you are. There were failures with Ada as well as I recall. Statically typed. Ahead of it's time. But in some critical use cases, it failed. It also cost a lot to maintain. Compilers/IDE's were super expensive. Yet there were cases of undefined behavior that you still had to (hopefully) catch in a peer review. This was the case of the Arianne 5 rocket explosion caused by software written in statically typed Ada. It's worth a read through: https://itsfoss.com/a-floating-point-error-that-caused-a-damage-worth-half-a-billion/ https://itsfoss.com/a-floating-point-error-that-caused-a-dam... Java and the log4j mess are similar. It's a statically typed language, but a poorly reviewed code base. The static typing didn't catch the security hole. And it's cost the US millions of dollars so far to fix it. Static typing may be nice and all, but it sure as hell ain't a silver bullet.
- friedman23 5y ago
  >Java and the log4j mess are similar. It's a statically typed language, but a poorly reviewed code base. The static typing didn't catch the security hole. And it's cost the US millions of dollars so far to fix it. This is a ridiculous statement and just really devalues everything you are saying. How is a vulnerability in a library that is completely orthogonal to typing relevant in this discussion. Static typing never claimed to cure programmer stupidity. Also when I say static typing I mean languages with good type systems, as much as people like to say typescript is bad because it's based on javascript, at least null errors are impossible if you are using strict mode unlike Java and Go where any variable could potentially be null and the compiler wont tell you if you have unhandled null cases.
  - bb88 5y ago
    You said: > Static typing is net 0 cost. We don't need to be "honest" static typing is obviously not free you need to think of types. The real revelation was that the cost of dynamic languages far exceeds the cost of a statically typed language. And my point is the static typed languages we do have didn't save us anything in terms of cost. I recommend maybe you read the hackernews posting guidelines before you post again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

bb88 5y ago

You're not wrong, but yet you are. There were failures with Ada as well as I recall. Statically typed. Ahead of it's time. But in some critical use cases, it failed. It also cost a lot to maintain. Compilers/IDE's were super expensive. Yet there were cases of undefined behavior that you still had to (hopefully) catch in a peer review. This was the case of the Arianne 5 rocket explosion caused by software written in statically typed Ada. It's worth a read through: https://itsfoss.com/a-floating-point-error-that-caused-a-damage-worth-half-a-billion/ https://itsfoss.com/a-floating-point-error-that-caused-a-dam... Java and the log4j mess are similar. It's a statically typed language, but a poorly reviewed code base. The static typing didn't catch the security hole. And it's cost the US millions of dollars so far to fix it. Static typing may be nice and all, but it sure as hell ain't a silver bullet.

friedman23 5y ago
>Java and the log4j mess are similar. It's a statically typed language, but a poorly reviewed code base. The static typing didn't catch the security hole. And it's cost the US millions of dollars so far to fix it. This is a ridiculous statement and just really devalues everything you are saying. How is a vulnerability in a library that is completely orthogonal to typing relevant in this discussion. Static typing never claimed to cure programmer stupidity. Also when I say static typing I mean languages with good type systems, as much as people like to say typescript is bad because it's based on javascript, at least null errors are impossible if you are using strict mode unlike Java and Go where any variable could potentially be null and the compiler wont tell you if you have unhandled null cases.
- bb88 5y ago
  You said: > Static typing is net 0 cost. We don't need to be "honest" static typing is obviously not free you need to think of types. The real revelation was that the cost of dynamic languages far exceeds the cost of a statically typed language. And my point is the static typed languages we do have didn't save us anything in terms of cost. I recommend maybe you read the hackernews posting guidelines before you post again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html