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Comment by worldsayshi | Hacker News Reader

But we need types people! Properly static ones that can be used to encode your intentions and handle inconsistency before even running the program. And yes I know that Clojure has an optional type system. But optional means that you cannot rely on having types in the libraries that you use. So you can't fit your stuff together with their stuff and have reasonable expectations that it will work once the user does that one thing you didn't think would be a most reasonable thing to do (of course it is, what were you thinking! And tell me again why you didn't just let the computer do that thinking for you?).

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Types do have a lot of benefits but they also come with a big cost: some programs are very hard to express in modern type systems. For example, consider a pattern that is becoming more common today in UI programming (even in plain javascript): keeping your UI in one big tree data structure, and then working on arbitrary paths (represented by a sequence of keys) into that data structure. That is not a pattern you can encode in a type system.

Types also come with a lot of inherent complexity that you don't get with dynamic programs. Recently, I wrote a Type Provider for web Routing in F#, and it is orders of magnitude more complicated than what a dynamic approach would have been. It is nice that it is not possible to express a program that uses route parameters the wrong way, or provide a route that is unreachable, etc, but it takes a lot more work than a dynamic version with no such safety.

One domain where I think static typing is worth it is for parsing. After having used FParsec to parse a structure, and also having tried it dynamically, I felt the static typing added little complexity for all the safety it brought, so it was very much worth it. But there are also some dynamic parsing libraries that much easier to get started with, such as Instaparse, so YMMV.

That pretty much describes my Angular data models, yes. My internal helper functions get passed sub-structures from the model, but Angular bindings get strings like "top.area.sub.fld" to name a variable.

Doubtless, there's another way to do this without a global / dynamic data tree, but this is working, at least for me.

Types + pattern matching -- best combination for working with trees.

I'm not sure if there's a library in F# similar to HXT, but in Haskell, working with large xml structures is a breeze.

There is also zippers

I use a pattern matcher that can match against types in Scheme, a language without static typing. Static types are just not the crucial feature that some people make them out to be. I believe this criticism of Pascal and C from SICP applies to other languages with static types (sans the pointer stuff):

    Pascal and C admit structures whose elements are structures. However,
    this requires that the programmer manipulate pointers explicitly, and
    adhere to the restriction that each field of a structure can contain
    only elements of a prespecified form. Unlike Lisp with its pairs,
    these languages have no built-in general-purpose glue that makes it
    easy to manipulate compound data in a uniform way.

With static typing, it's also difficult to write procedures that operate on arguments of which the type is none of the procedure's business.

https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/2_002e2.xhtml#FOOT73

Well, I was definitely not mentioning Pascal and C. Haskell's type system is much easier to work with.

The thing is that any operation you are using on those arguments (of which the type is none of the procedure's business) can be described by an interface which the argument implements.

You're much safer knowing in compile time that the operations you'll use will be valid, instead of hoping something doesn't crash in runtime.

So use F#'s dynamic typing parts? Or make everything obj and cast away? Unless most solutions don't work with types then it seems that you're better off having them in the language and using escape hatches as necessary.

Perhaps the ideal language would be one where every library is statically typed, either through social or technological means, but the application language is optionally typed. This would be a pretty big departure from most normal languages, but with opinionated languages like Go (which comes with its own code formatter) existing, it's not too crazy.

Typed Racket working for me lately https://www.classes.cs.uchicago.edu/archive/2014/fall/15100-...

But again no massive ecosystem of libraries to simply plug in so unsure if 'secret weapon'. Also I have experienced the nightmare of trying to port non typed libraries to typed Clojure and falling into a rabbit hole of errors propagating. Haven't had the same problem with Racket but ecosystem is not even close to Clojure so anecdotes worthless.

One day we will find that perfect type system (and associated compiler/IDE/Interactive front end) and then everyone will take one big sigh of relief. And then we all will start fixing problems in a way that makes them stay fixed.

I agree types prevent people from shooting in their foot. Types are what make program ide friendly, and programmer friendly. Got that.

But types are also what cause us to think with in the box i.e to say powerful type hierarchies, the ones that save us from writing boiler-plate are also the ones that are difficult to understand, and in Java, somewhat weird. Not to mention they are needlessly specific - Unless you have ML style parameterized types.

Also, note that if you are working in type safe language, does not mean you can escape writing tests. You still have to write tests.

Just like human body is not all bone, though it gives structure, nor a bridge is all steel, even though that is what keeps it together, likewise I don't believe all aspects of a project should be written in a strictly and statically typed language. Dynamic types have their niche, and the nice thing about dynamic types is you are just concerned with ideas aka abstractions instead of type algebra and its mechanics.

Once you have protected your interfaces(with a type safe language), you are past "Idk what i am reading" stage, and hence in a safer place to do type agnostic things - and the sweet thing with clojure and lisps, yeah sweet if you get it, you can almost always break what you think your ceiling of capabilities is.

I fully agree.

Without types you just can't do much, or at least, if you're super good, compiler can't do much.

And most of the time you're trying to make something faster.

HackerNews, a type hating community.

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