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Comment by AsyncAwait | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but I think the kind of static typing that was 'shat on' for years is not the same as the one being praised today.

The shat on one is the old Java, verbose, obtrusive style. The newly praised one is Haskell-style, type inferred, expressive...

Now you could say that's not new, BUT what is new is marrying ML style type system to languages whose other concepts devs are largely familiar with and packaging it the right way to get into production, instead of just academia and that being the case even for historically impenetrable low-level programming and such.

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Agreed. The article that opened my eyes to this shows (IMO) a serious deficiency in C#'s type system compared to F#'s, which includes the concept of tagged-union types. It shows a very simple shopping cart program that can't be modeled cleanly in c# without using the visitor pattern....which is difficult to read IMO.

https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/csharp/union-types-in-csha...

These are the kind of comments that make HN so special: knowledgeable and insightful, due to deep experience with the past and critical understanding of the present. It isn’t just a rush to what is shiny and new, but is capable of identifying what is novel and valuable, and is articulate enough to explain why.

Normally my comment would be an unnecessary back-slapping, but since the conversation veered this way, I think it is appropriate to call out your comment as something that represents the spirit that makes HN unique and wonderful.

I never realised how highly some people praise hackernews comments lol

Hackernews has an _instagram filter_ where everybody brags about how smart they are.

Then there's a bunch of fresh grads who fanboy their favourite tech companies.

Then every so often you get a gem of a comment from knowledge leader in the industry.

But that's quickly overshadowed by 'my Startup, my Startup, mah Startup' and how everybody wants to be rich one day.

But like every larger community in the internet, it eventually derives itself into an echo chamber.

Current-day HN strikes me as very similar to early 00s Slashdot, albeit more self-serious and with an ideology more informed by SV capitalism/entrepreneurialism than the convoluted politics of open source software.

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