3 ms·

I think this is referring to JS's unfortunate habit of doing nonsensical things with types unless the user takes special precautions. For years I thought I nee

by andai 2y ago

I think this is referring to JS's unfortunate habit of doing nonsensical things with types unless the user takes special precautions. For years I thought I needed explicit static typing, until I tried Python, which is also dynamically typed, and found that I had none of the problems I had in JS. This is because Python is strongly typed. Indeed Python has the opposite problem of being a bit too pedantic with the type conversions. I thought it was interesting that C#, which is also strongly typed, lets you do string + number. (IIRC it has something to do with how they both descend from Object...) Worth mentioning that I do think static typing is a very good idea in any nontrivial program, and I wish more languages forced the programmer to be explicit here — TypeScript and even Rust have both bitten me in the ass with the type system making incorrect assumptions instead of just asking me (i.e. forcing me to actually specify the program and eliminate guesswork).

chowells 2y ago
> IIRC it has something to do with how they both descend from Object... It's far less interesting than that. The truth is that the symbol + means a wide variety of different things in the language, and it uses compile-time type information to select exactly which of those things it means. In the case where either operand is a string, it means string concatenation, with string conversion for a non-string operand if one exists. That specific conversion part is the only thing that cares that stuff descends from Object. The conversion algorithm is "call ToString() and let dynamic dispatch sort it out." (For completeness, the other meanings are various forms of addition, but adding two doubles is a different machine instruction than adding two floats. It really does still need to use type information to figure out which of those operations it is.)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
RHSeeger 2y ago
Static typing provides different benefits to strong typing. Both are useful in their own ways. And both can get in the way (and not be worth it) in some cases.

by andai 2y ago

chowells 2y ago

> IIRC it has something to do with how they both descend from Object... It's far less interesting than that. The truth is that the symbol + means a wide variety of different things in the language, and it uses compile-time type information to select exactly which of those things it means. In the case where either operand is a string, it means string concatenation, with string conversion for a non-string operand if one exists. That specific conversion part is the only thing that cares that stuff descends from Object. The conversion algorithm is "call ToString() and let dynamic dispatch sort it out." (For completeness, the other meanings are various forms of addition, but adding two doubles is a different machine instruction than adding two floats. It really does still need to use type information to figure out which of those operations it is.)

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

RHSeeger 2y ago

Static typing provides different benefits to strong typing. Both are useful in their own ways. And both can get in the way (and not be worth it) in some cases.