Hacker News Reader

Comment by floatrock | Hacker News Reader

It's about having the right tool for the job.

Type checking is all about complexity management... you don't need it if you're hacking on a weekend project, but when you have hundreds of developers on a million-line codebase, it can save you tons of time.

Dynamic languages have their advantages too (productivity, REPL's, etc.)

Why NOT combine the two features? Just because it's not built into the core of the language doesn't mean you can't benefit from the complexity management aspect if your job is to manage the code complexity in a large developer workforce.

View on HN

> Type checking is all about complexity management... you don't need it if you're hacking on a weekend project

I see this argument a lot but I don't buy it. You might not need Java's SimpleBeanFactoryAwareAspectInstanceFactory but I don't believe putting in types hinders quick prototype development; I think, in general, it helps it. Especially when combined with good tooling and a good IDE.

I code in mostly static languages, and even when I'm doing 1000 line python projects I miss types.

It especially helps in refactoring things quickly without needing a special IDE environment. It also lets me skip an entire class of unit tests that boil down into type checking.

>Especially when combined with good tooling and a good IDE.

Quite a few people, myself included, don't use IDEs.

Many of the "dynamically typed language" features can be had in statically typed languages as well: there are statically typed languages that have REPls for example. Your point about having higher productivity in the beginning and then retrofitting types after that still stands though.

> Dynamic languages have their advantages too (productivity, REPL's, etc.)

I've seen the productivity argument a lot, so I'm curious about this perspective. What does "productivity" mean here? Shipping code? Because if you ship code that doesn't work, did you really ship it? If you're writing a small throwaway sub-1000-line utility for internal use, I can see that, but if you're getting paid to ship code what is the definition of productivity?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com