3 ms·

The better the type system is, the more bugs it prevents, so one has to spend less time unit testing. Sadly, it also means the language is harder to learn, so t

The better the type system is, the more bugs it prevents, so one has to spend less time unit testing. Sadly, it also means the language is harder to learn, so the rest of us are stuck with horrible, unsafe languages.

kaashif 3y ago
This hasn't exactly been my experience, Python isn't easier to learn than e.g. Java because of the lack of static typing, it's easier because the language is more expressive. I actually think there is literally no downside to making typing opt out rather than opt in - beginners benefit from the compiler saying they accidentally swapped two arguments around - how could they not? I have helped beginners with untyped Python codebases and it's a lot harder to tell what function parameters are supposed to be than in Java or C++, leaving aside any other considerations.
- JSavageOne 3y ago
  The downside is increased short-term dev time and code, and thus increasing rigidity of the code. In most cases this tradeoff is still worth it, but sometimes speed and flexibility is a higher priority, hence why I prefer opt-in
- p1necone 3y ago
  Anecdotally as someone who writes a lot of Typescript - which has a very expressive type system, most of the time when I need to help someone who's "fighting" with the type system the issue is that they've written a bug but the error message just isn't particularly clear. Which is loads better than them writing a bug and then only discovering it in production. Mentally parsing the type errors is an art though - generally you want to ignore pretty much all but the bottom 1 or 2 lines - the rest is a bunch of very verbose information at a much higher level of abstraction than you care about.
  - other_herbert 3y ago
    This exactly… I’ve had several devs come to me with things like “react won’t let me do this” … which is really typescript and really it’s that they are doing something wrong in any lang and it is just good news that the type system caught it

kaashif 3y ago

This hasn't exactly been my experience, Python isn't easier to learn than e.g. Java because of the lack of static typing, it's easier because the language is more expressive. I actually think there is literally no downside to making typing opt out rather than opt in - beginners benefit from the compiler saying they accidentally swapped two arguments around - how could they not? I have helped beginners with untyped Python codebases and it's a lot harder to tell what function parameters are supposed to be than in Java or C++, leaving aside any other considerations.

JSavageOne 3y ago
The downside is increased short-term dev time and code, and thus increasing rigidity of the code. In most cases this tradeoff is still worth it, but sometimes speed and flexibility is a higher priority, hence why I prefer opt-in
p1necone 3y ago
Anecdotally as someone who writes a lot of Typescript - which has a very expressive type system, most of the time when I need to help someone who's "fighting" with the type system the issue is that they've written a bug but the error message just isn't particularly clear. Which is loads better than them writing a bug and then only discovering it in production. Mentally parsing the type errors is an art though - generally you want to ignore pretty much all but the bottom 1 or 2 lines - the rest is a bunch of very verbose information at a much higher level of abstraction than you care about.
- other_herbert 3y ago
  This exactly… I’ve had several devs come to me with things like “react won’t let me do this” … which is really typescript and really it’s that they are doing something wrong in any lang and it is just good news that the type system caught it