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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

On Reddit the other day, I saw a Typescript (type-safe) implementation of a `get()` function like `get({ a: { b: { c: ['foo'] } } }, "a.b.c[0]") === 'foo'` using recursive string templates in the type definition.

e.g. get({ name: 'Toby' }, "name.prop1.prop2") would fail as you're trying to call .prop1 on a string.

Really blew my mind. I'm used to having to give up simple APIs like that when moving to a statically-typed language.

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You might see if your language supports lenses - a lot of ML-like languages can do something like:

    get({ a: { b: { c: ['foo'] } } }, a *> b *> c *> _0)

and a macro to unfold the lens from a literal string is probably something that exists as well.

For sure. I just think that sort of string API is a great example of something we've historically had to trade off for type-safety.

There are of course nice qualities of simple functional composition and custom operators, though it comes with another layer of overhead that you wouldn't necessarily always choose over a simpler API in every case. Richer typed expressiveness lets us pick the right trade-off without being forced.

My point is that it's something a lot of statically-typed languages have been able to do for a while - the classic lens paper/talk is about 10 years old at this point, and the literal-type support that you'd need to convert a string to a typesafe lens has been around for a pretty similar length of time at least in some places.

I like monocle-ts for lenses in TS https://github.com/gcanti/monocle-ts

Also see Immer Js

https://github.com/immerjs/immer

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