| ▲ | ajkjk 4 hours ago |
| I don't think ... serious people... argued that. That's a bit hyperbolic so I'm sure I'm wrong, but I have an ace: if you point me at very smart people who argued against types I'm gonna say that they weren't serious. I think it's not possible, if you have the relevant experience of working on both typed and untyped codebases of at least moderate complexity with at least one collaborator, to come away seriously believing that the untyped way is superior (unless you were forced to use a really bad typed language, I guess). And arguing that untyped languages are better without that experience is also not serious, in the sense that anyone can unseriously say anything if they don't care about being well-informed enough to be right. |
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| ▲ | steve_adams_86 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I worked with people who would consider themselves serious, and are still in the industry and doing fine. A few have certainly gone on to be more prominent and get paid a lot more than I am—not that it's a perfect measure of seriousness. In the early days they would often say things like "but we have prop types, why use TypeScript", "why not use JSDoc" (this made no sense at the time), or "it's an exercise in needless complexity". It was really tough to sell them on TypeScript for years. I think there are developers who are very goal-oriented with a narrow perspective on getting from point A to point B, and their understanding of the process isn't particularly holistic, rigorous, or geared towards external or knock-on factors like maintainability, performance, bugs, etc. They deal with it when circumstances force them to, and no sooner. Defining types is a complete waste of time to someone like that. These people thrive where teams are primarily expected to just ship things, and in my experience they often hate needing to think about things like types, tests, or code quality beyond running a linter. So, they're serious people in one school of thought. They contribute meaningfully to projects. I think they're a large constituent of the new class of vibe coders who laugh at you if you look at the code. That's fine, they're doing their thing, and there are more than a few ways to get programs into people's hands. That way just isn't the way I like to. |
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| ▲ | horsawlarway 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Look at some of the typing present in MS COM back in the IE5/6 days and we can discuss more. I can honestly tell you - I'll take untyped languages any day of the week over that clusterfuck. Personally - I also think people really underestimate just how much the tooling around types has improved over the last 20 years. If I'm having to try to look up the difference between iBrowserInterface6 and iBrowserInterface5 and iBrowserInterface4... (and yes - shit like this really did exist: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/shdeprec...) And I have no tooling for autocomplete, and the docs are shoddy, and google is just coming on the scene... People understandable want to throw their computer out the window. Types are great. Some forms of them were not. |
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| ▲ | ajkjk 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | completely agree. but I felt like even then it was clear that types were a good idea and the implementations were not. For instance I started programming on Java 4 or 5 and the types were pretty bad---but still it was obviously the right way to go compared to JS or, god forbid, shell. | | |
| ▲ | horsawlarway 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > but still it was obviously the right way to go compared to JS or, god forbid, shell. I just don't think this is true. Frankly - it's hard to argue this at all (even today) given that JS is the dominate language on the planet, and it lacks types... as does python, which had a reputation for decades as THE language to use to teach new folks to code. Or take PHP which dominated server development for a LOOONG time: also lacks types. Ruby on Rails has a wonderful reputation as the "get shit done" framework: no types. Types are good for modern software companies, where code size has ballooned up very high (common to work on a codebase with hundreds of thousands of lines) or teams are large (50+ developers) and terrible if you just want to hammer out something that works as a solo dev. Do I like types today? Sure - the tooling is solid, and I work on large codebases with large teams. Did I like types as a solo dev at 3 person startup? no. | | |
| ▲ | jazzypants an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | It's still useful for things like onboarding the fourth person to your start-up. Good types get you half the way to good documentation. | |
| ▲ | dprkh 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > as does python, which had a reputation for decades as THE language to use to teach new folks to code I am very perplexed by this. I am going through Neetcode's DSA course where he explains what RAM and arrays are, but then he goes on to say something like "but since we are going to use Python, none of this applies." Personally, I learned the most about how software really works from reading The Rust Programming Language. It not only teaches you how to program in Rust, but also how memory works, what a string really is, etc. | |
| ▲ | esafak 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Those languages dominated because they were simple. Then they grew, and their users grew up, and realized that worse is better. At a startup you can choose even fancier languages, since nobody is stopping you! |
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| ▲ | TedDoesntTalk 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Java has a lesson of what can go wrong with types, just as parent says. That example is dates and times. So many types… And before Java finally settled on what we have today, we had 3rd-party libraries like jodatime that tried to fix it. I guess it’s in a good state today, but it took a LocalDateTime.MAX to get there. I mean an Instant.MAX. No, I mean an OffsetDateTime.MAX. No, I mean new Date(Long.MAX_VALUE). Oh wait I meant new Timestamp(Long.MAX_VALUE). No, I mean LocalTime.MAX. I’ll stop now, but i could go on. |
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| ▲ | nh23423fefe 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This isn't a good example at all. Those interfaces are subtypes. |
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| ▲ | ChadNauseam 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's easy to say that now, but it used to be that all mainstream typed languages had absolutely terrible type systems that got in your way as much as they helped |
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| ▲ | steve_adams_86 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Absolutely, TypeScript is remarkably expressive in my opinion. The inference and option to bail out with `any` is nice for some teams in some cases, too. They did an excellent job of making it accessible. |
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| ▲ | mrkeen 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They're still right here in sibling comments |
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| ▲ | hombre_fatal 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I don't think ... serious people... argued that. Static vs dynamic typing is no less ubiquitous in online forums over the decades than tabs vs spaces and vim vs emacs. |
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| ▲ | ajkjk 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I feel like I see all of these debates far less than I used to? Well I don't see anyone arguing about vim and emacs anymore at all, and spaces have mostly won over tabs, and static typing has mostly won over dynamic, with the holdouts being comparative novices and people who program in less modern environments, like in academia and at smaller companies. | | |
| ▲ | asa400 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Are the banks and trading firms that use e.g. Clojure/Elixir/Erlang/Python "comparative novices" or "less modern", whatever that means? These are some of the most sophisticated shops I've ever seen, doing some serious software engineering. I like static types as much as the next person and have written probably more Rust and Scala than anything else, but this seems maybe a bit of a gross generalization. | |
| ▲ | hombre_fatal 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah, we are definitely past the hey day of these debates, though you can still find them. e.g. Gradual typing was since added to PHP and Python which ended some debate like how linting tools shut down a lot of whitespace debates. | |
| ▲ | alserio 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Spaces over tabs? Since when? | | |
| ▲ | ajkjk 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | i could be wrong, but it was enforced as the default at several places I worked, and most editors now have the option of the tab key inserting spaces to bridge the gap. (I don't care about the actual debate; just, I thought I had noticed it had mostly gone in this direction) |
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| ▲ | claytongulick an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've been writing code since the 80s, professionally since the mid 90s, in almost every major language, platform and operating system, from 8 bit microcontrollers to large scale web platforms. So, not sure that counts as "serious" in your estimation, but I would definitely argue that dynamically typed languages are superior for a large class of problems. Also, just a tip: it's usually better to be less sure of yourself, and seek to understand other's reasoning. It'll get you a lot farther than trying to convince everyone of how right you are. If you're not sure why an experienced developer would hold an opinion different than yours, why not just ask? |
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| ▲ | samtheprogram 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| ....they did ...and... the camp still exists |
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| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [deleted] |
