3 ms·

I'm not the parent but at least for me, my #1 complaint is "whiny computer". Especially when dealing with someone else's code, it can be a ceremonial roadblock

I'm not the parent but at least for me, my #1 complaint is "whiny computer". Especially when dealing with someone else's code, it can be a ceremonial roadblock for moving data around that could easily be processed without issue but artificial constraints in order to service an orthodoxy have been erected to make things needlessly more brittle. In the name of reducing bugs, it in practice can often impose workarounds that increase the chance the confusion and more bugs. This isn't always the case but most of the time things are built in incompetent hands (including my own). Accommodating for this reality is probably the better move. Imposition of absolutist rules doesn't improve the behavior of incompetency, it just makes it more subversive and the defects it creates more insidious

maxbond 3y ago
Hmm interesting. Are these projects that were originally untyped but then gradually typed later? I ask because I've not really encountered that, the most I've had to do is add asserts or ifs to help explain to the typechecker something that I could see as a human. A few times in a gradually typed language I've needed to add an ignore to a line. But it's been rare in my experience. I try not to think of it as whining, I try to think of it as the type checker helpfully pointing out, "hey, you haven't done your due diligence here." I ran into this advice when learning Rust and it made it much more pleasant. In the same way that you might chase a series of failing tests to finish a task, you can chase a series of type warnings. I have them integrated into my editor, so usually the "series" is length 1 because I'm knocking them out as they arise. The projects I've worked with that were previously untyped (Python SaaS backends), I never actually ran the type checker on the entire source code. But if I had a megabyte of type errors that weren't really going to provide value to the business, yeah that would feel like a waste of time. Unless we were having serious quality issues and it was between annotating the entire codebase and rewriting it from scratch, I'd leave well enough alone - it's a tool, not a religion. But the new code I'm checking in, that's getting annotated for sure. I don't really see types as arbitrary absolutist rules. They're the semantics of the language, they're the rules you're following whether you have a typechecker or not. And if you violate them you're gunnuh get bugs and crashes regardless. I too am a flawed human who frequently makes mistakes, and I like having them caught immediately, before I've even checked my code in.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  I probably just choose my projects wrong. I get attracted to charity cases and disasters for some reason. I've tried to stop but there's obviously something complicated going on
  - maxbond 3y ago
    Haha. It's a niche and I respect it. All software is bad but it's worth supporting software that's useful.
- cxr 3y ago
  > I try not to think of it as whining, I try to think of it as the type checker helpfully pointing out, "hey, you haven't done your due diligence here." It can be both true that you haven't done your due diligence in the sense that you haven't taken care to handle the entire range of all possible inputs (or at least it seems like it when you're only considering the relevant code section in isolation), but that as a practical matter it's just not a problem. So the time spent attending to what it's nagging you to take care of is time wasted. Alternatively, you're not even a program maintainer, you're just trying to build the thing so you can run it for your own one-off use, but it refuses to even build because of some issue totally irrelevant to what it is you're about to use it for. The approach that the TypeScript compiler takes is beneficial—complain about the thing, but don't let that prevent the compiler from running to completion and still producing a program that you can run.
  - maxbond 3y ago
    Sure, as a mindset thing I find thinking of it as "whining" leads to a deeply frustrating experience where I feel like I'm fighting my tooling, but thinking of it as "helping" makes the work lighter.

maxbond 3y ago

Hmm interesting. Are these projects that were originally untyped but then gradually typed later? I ask because I've not really encountered that, the most I've had to do is add asserts or ifs to help explain to the typechecker something that I could see as a human. A few times in a gradually typed language I've needed to add an ignore to a line. But it's been rare in my experience. I try not to think of it as whining, I try to think of it as the type checker helpfully pointing out, "hey, you haven't done your due diligence here." I ran into this advice when learning Rust and it made it much more pleasant. In the same way that you might chase a series of failing tests to finish a task, you can chase a series of type warnings. I have them integrated into my editor, so usually the "series" is length 1 because I'm knocking them out as they arise. The projects I've worked with that were previously untyped (Python SaaS backends), I never actually ran the type checker on the entire source code. But if I had a megabyte of type errors that weren't really going to provide value to the business, yeah that would feel like a waste of time. Unless we were having serious quality issues and it was between annotating the entire codebase and rewriting it from scratch, I'd leave well enough alone - it's a tool, not a religion. But the new code I'm checking in, that's getting annotated for sure. I don't really see types as arbitrary absolutist rules. They're the semantics of the language, they're the rules you're following whether you have a typechecker or not. And if you violate them you're gunnuh get bugs and crashes regardless. I too am a flawed human who frequently makes mistakes, and I like having them caught immediately, before I've even checked my code in.

kristopolous 3y ago
I probably just choose my projects wrong. I get attracted to charity cases and disasters for some reason. I've tried to stop but there's obviously something complicated going on
- maxbond 3y ago
  Haha. It's a niche and I respect it. All software is bad but it's worth supporting software that's useful.
cxr 3y ago
> I try not to think of it as whining, I try to think of it as the type checker helpfully pointing out, "hey, you haven't done your due diligence here." It can be both true that you haven't done your due diligence in the sense that you haven't taken care to handle the entire range of all possible inputs (or at least it seems like it when you're only considering the relevant code section in isolation), but that as a practical matter it's just not a problem. So the time spent attending to what it's nagging you to take care of is time wasted. Alternatively, you're not even a program maintainer, you're just trying to build the thing so you can run it for your own one-off use, but it refuses to even build because of some issue totally irrelevant to what it is you're about to use it for. The approach that the TypeScript compiler takes is beneficial—complain about the thing, but don't let that prevent the compiler from running to completion and still producing a program that you can run.
- maxbond 3y ago
  Sure, as a mindset thing I find thinking of it as "whining" leads to a deeply frustrating experience where I feel like I'm fighting my tooling, but thinking of it as "helping" makes the work lighter.