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Comment by vbsteven | Hacker News Reader

> There are trade offs for both

Exactly.

Personally I like that bit of extra code because it gives every class one reason to exist. There are no conflicts so the type system can be used fully without ambiguity.

I’ve always disliked the way early rails promoted fat models that combined serialisation, deserialisation, validation, persistence, querying and business logic in the same class.

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I personally bounce back and forth about this. My experience is probably colored by the fact that I'm doing this in C++. Boilerplate gets annoying there (and attempts to cut it down tend to produce lots of incomprehensible function templates). I like the idea of using types to encode assertions at a fine granularity. I dislike the amount of tiny little functions this creates. I also dislike that the resulting code is only navigable with an IDE - otherwise you spend 50% of your time chasing definitions of these little types.

Ok yes, C++ might not be the greatest language for this.

My experience here is mostly from Kotlin which is a great language for this. Nullability, extension methods, (reified) generics, data classes, delegates, etc can all help reduce boilerplate.

You should take a look at Scala. Lots of things that have to be special-case language features in Kotlin become just a straightforward use of higher-kinded types or a combination of a couple of existing language features.

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