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Looking at that blog post, I find it illustrative in how people who like strong types and people who dislike strong types are addressing different form of bugs. If the main types of issues comes from bugs like 1 + "2" == 12", then strong types is a big help. It also enables many developers who spend the majority of time in a programming editor to quickly get automatic help with such bugs.

The other side is those people who do not find those kind of bugs annoying, or they simply don't get hit by such bugs at a rate that is high enough to warrant using a strong type system. Developers who spend their time prototyping in ipython also get less out of the strong types. The bugs that those developers are concerned about are design bugs, like finding out why a bunch of small async programs reading from a message buss may stall once every second Friday, and where the bug may be a dependency of a dependency of a dependency that do not use a socket timeout. Types are similar not going to help those who spend the wast majority of time on bugs where someone finally says "This design could never have worked".

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teddyh 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Take care to differentiate strong/weak typing from dynamic/static typing. Many dynamically typed languages (especially older ones) are also weakly typed, but some dynamic langugages, like Python, are strongly typed. 1 + "2" == 12 is weak typing, and Python has strong typing. Type declarations are static typing, in contrast to traditional Python, which had (and still has) dynamic typing.

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satvikpendem 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not about the bugs, it's about designing the layout of the program in types first (ie, laying out all of the data structures required) such that the actual coding of the functionality is fairly trivial. This is known as type driven development: https://blog.ploeh.dk/2015/08/10/type-driven-development/

	▲	slowking2 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		At work, I find type hints useful as basically enforced documentation and as a weak sort of test, but few type systems offer decent basic support for the sort of things you would need to do type driven programming in scientific/numerical work. Things like making sure matrices have compatible dimensions, handling units, and constraining the range of a numerical variable would be a solid minimum. I've read that F# has units, Ada and Pascal have ranges as types (my understanding is these are runtime enforced mostly), Rust will land const generics that might be useful for matrix type stuff some time soon. Does any language support all 3 of these things well together? Do you basically need fully dependent types for this? Obviously, with discipline you can work to enforce all these things at runtime, but I'd like it if there was a language that made all 3 of these things straightforward.

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hbrn an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What's even worse, when typing is treated as an indisputable virtue (and not a tradeoff), pretty much every team starts sacrificing readability for the sake of typing.

And lo and behold, they end up with _more_ design bugs. And the sad part is that they will never even recognize that too much typing is to blame.

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IshKebab an hour ago | parent [-]

Nonsense. You might consider it a tradeoff, but it's a very heavily skewed one. Minor downsides on one side, huge upsides on the other.

Also I would say type hints sacrifice aesthetics, not readability. Most code with type hints is easier to read, in the same way that graphs with labelled axes and units are easier to read. They might have more "stuff" there which people might think is ugly, but they convey critical information which allows you to understand the code.

	▲	hbrn 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Most code with type hints is easier to read That has not been my experience in the past few years. I've always been a fan of type hints in Python: intention behind them was to contribute to readability and when developer had that intention in mind, they worked really well. However, with the release of mypy and Typescript, engineering culture largely shifted towards "typing is a virtue" mindset. Type hints are no longer a documentation tool, they are a constraint enforcing tool. And that tool is often at odds with readability. Readability is subjective and ephemeral, type constraints (and intellisense) are very tangible. Naturally, developers are failing to find balance between the two.

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tasn 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think you're missing the point of the blog a bit, as the `1 + "2" == "12"` type of issues wasn't it. It definitely also sucks and much more common than you make it sound (especially when refactoring) but it's definitely not that.

Anyhow, no need to rehash the same arguments, there was a long thread here on HN about the post, you can read some of it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37764326

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rty32 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The other side is those people who do not find those kind of bugs annoying

Anecdotally, I find these are the same people who work less effectively and efficiently. At my company, I know people who mainly use Notepad++ for editing code when VSCode (or another IDE) is readily available, who use print over debuggers, who don't get frustrated by runtime errors that could be caught in IDEs, and who opt out of using coding assistants. I happen to know as a matter of fact that the person who codes in Notepad++ frequently has trivial errors, and generally these people don't push code out as fast they could.

And they don't care to change the way they work even after seeing the alternatives and knowing they are objectively more efficient.

I am not their managers, so I say to myself "this is none of my business" and move on. I do feel pity for them.

	▲	lblume an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Well, using print over debuggers is fairly common in Rust and other languages with strong type systems because most bugs are, due to the extreme lengths the compiler goes to to able to detect them even before running the program, just lacks of information of the value of an expression at a single point in the program flow, which is where dbg! shines. I agree with all the other points though. Anecdotally, I was just writing a generic BPE implementation, and spend a few hours tracking down a bug. I used debug statements to look at the values of expressions, and noticed that something was off. Only later did I figure out that I modified a value, but used the old copy — a simple logic error that #[must_use] could have prevented. cargo clippy -W pedantic is annoying, but this taught be I better listen to what it has to say.
	▲	otherme123 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>these people don't push code out as fast they could. Well, one of my coworkers pushes code quite fast, and also he is the one who get rejected more often because he keep adding .tmp, .pyc and even .env files to his commits. I guess "git add asterisk" is faster, and thus more efficient, than adding files slowly or taking time to edit gitignore. Not so long ago I read a history here in HN about a guy that first coded in his head, then wrote everything in paper, and finally coded in a computer. It compiled without errors. Slow pusher? Inefficient?