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If you're writing software that will be long-lived with multiple developers, the safety, correctness and strict type system is absolutely necessary for maintain

If you're writing software that will be long-lived with multiple developers, the safety, correctness and strict type system is absolutely necessary for maintainability and refactoring purposes alone. Even for a CRUD app (maybe especially for a CRUD app as you're marshaling objects of different types around, usually), and even when runtime speed is a secondary concern.

simion314 5y ago
But a higher level language with a GC and good types would be more productive , I would suggest to also check the ecosystem not only the language, the access to documentation, and developers (if you need to build a team). From my experience big projects suffer not because of the language but because of bad architecture caused by inexperienced developers.
- andrewjf 5y ago
  I don't disagree with the ecosystem argument, nor the argument that poorly thought out architecture is a big cause, as well. I don't think having a GC de facto makes you more productive and that's worth arguing about itself. My point was that having the ability to perform "fearless refactoring" to improve architecture and adapt to changing needs of the software needs ruthless type system support to catch the non-obvious areas that you just broke and make sure that API contracts are still correct and to make sure you're not deserializing random stuff into `interface{}` or worse, `Any`, `Value` or `void *`.
  - simion314 5y ago
    We had strong types and languages that allowed that before Rust, I do not understand why would people push Rust everywhere and not focus on the stuff it is actually good at like low level stuff where performance and safety is needed.
dnautics 5y ago
> the safety, correctness and strict type system is absolutely necessary for maintainability and refactoring purposes alone Erlang would beg to differ, and it has been continuously running on systems with uptimes longer than rust has existed.

simion314 5y ago

But a higher level language with a GC and good types would be more productive , I would suggest to also check the ecosystem not only the language, the access to documentation, and developers (if you need to build a team). From my experience big projects suffer not because of the language but because of bad architecture caused by inexperienced developers.

andrewjf 5y ago
I don't disagree with the ecosystem argument, nor the argument that poorly thought out architecture is a big cause, as well. I don't think having a GC de facto makes you more productive and that's worth arguing about itself. My point was that having the ability to perform "fearless refactoring" to improve architecture and adapt to changing needs of the software needs ruthless type system support to catch the non-obvious areas that you just broke and make sure that API contracts are still correct and to make sure you're not deserializing random stuff into `interface{}` or worse, `Any`, `Value` or `void *`.
- simion314 5y ago
  We had strong types and languages that allowed that before Rust, I do not understand why would people push Rust everywhere and not focus on the stuff it is actually good at like low level stuff where performance and safety is needed.

dnautics 5y ago

> the safety, correctness and strict type system is absolutely necessary for maintainability and refactoring purposes alone Erlang would beg to differ, and it has been continuously running on systems with uptimes longer than rust has existed.