5 ms·

Why not both?

• dmitriid 5y ago
  Because it should be the computer's job to aid the user, not the other way around :D Though proper error reporting is quite hard and too many tools transfer the burden of figuring what happened to the user.
  • dllthomas 5y ago
    > it should be the computer's job to aid the user Most languages "aid the user" with better error locality by requiring the user aid them with far more type annotations. Lack of error locality is presently a downside of relying on pervasive type inference (at least in both OCaml and Haskell). I expect there's room (and responsibility) to improve, and so I do accord the language some of the blame. But error locality can be recovered by adding back some of the annotations that another language might require, and it can be optionally deferred until the locality is desired. I don't think it's right to say that that's requiring more help from the user than the baseline, and I think it's right to place some of the blame on the user misusing the tools if they're not adding enough annotations to get the kind of error locality they want from the tool they're using (as noted in the article, the author stopped doing that, although it may've been an overreaction).