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0 pointsyawaramin4y ago0 comments

> But in practice, they're just a bad match for projects where the defining characteristic is unstable ground. They force artificial clarity when the reality is murky.

The rebuttal to this is provided by another post from Alexis King: https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2020/01/19/no-dynamic-typ...

> This story sounds compelling, but it isn’t true. The flaw is in the premise: static types are not about “classifying the world” or pinning down the structure of every value in a system. The reality is that static type systems allow specifying exactly how much a component needs to know about the structure of its inputs, and conversely, how much it doesn’t.

Static typing helps you to safely model the parts of the system that you actually do know about, while allowing you to leave the unknown parts loosely defined. And when business requirements change, the compiler helps you to make those changes in a safe, guided way. This is why people often report the experience of doing large refactorings driven by compiler error messages, then running and finding that the change works correctly on the first try. A confidence few report in dynamically-typed languages.

> After doing a couple dozen, I'm seeing a pattern: developers using static tooling (e.g., Java, TypeScript) get circa half as much done as people using dynamic tooling (Python, plain JS).

I hope you understand and accept the fact that interview code challenges are not very representative of real-world software engineering. On-the-spot interview code is throwaway; real production code is not.

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wpietri4y ago

In this case, the interview problem was a simplified version of a thing the team gets asked to do. So I believe it was as representative as possible for an hour's coding.

I disagree that "real production code" is not throwaway. In situations of high requirements volatility, a great deal of production code ends up getting thrown away, because either a) it's intended to be a short-lived way to learn about the domain, or b) it's built on an assumption that turns out to be incorrect. And until the project hits economic sustainability, a lot of assumptions necessarily get made. It's only once the project is economically sustainable that we have some confidence that the code will be around for the long haul.

If your point is that most people are using statically typed languages wrong for high-volatility situations, I'll take your word for it. There were definitely times Typescript users seemed to be unnecessarily constraining things, for example. But I'm not sold that the more elaborate approach of being thoughtfully and explicitly untyped for a project's early stages for the sake of prototyping in a statically typed language would yield much practical gain.

yawaraminOP4y ago

> In this case, the interview problem was a simplified version of a thing the team gets asked to do. So I believe it was as representative as possible for an hour's coding.

That's exactly my point–code written under pressure during an hour-long code challenge will never be representative of code written during normal day-to-day coding. Even if the problem domain is similar to a real-world problem.

> I disagree that "real production code" is not throwaway. In situations of high requirements volatility, a great deal of production code ends up getting thrown away

But it's not written to be thrown away an hour later. That's not really the kind of 'production code' that any reasonable person would be talking about in this thread. If you're talking about exploratory data analysis, data science or whatever, sure, you can consider it 'production code', but it's not the product of the craft of software engineering, it's more about running quick experiments.

> I'm not sold that the more elaborate approach of being thoughtfully and explicitly untyped for a project's early stages for the sake of prototyping in a statically typed language would yield much practical gain.

There are many different kinds of projects. And people who work with good statically typed languages can prototype quite well using types to drive their domain modelling. It's a different way of working. You should read some of what Scott Wlaschin has written to get an idea.

wpietri4y ago

> but it's not the product of the craft of software engineering

Sure? This seems pretty no-true-Scotsman to me. If you want to define some the things I need to do as not real software, feel free. But they're still things my team has to get done. To me there's a spectrum of domain stability on which the code rests. It's frequently not possible to know in advance which bits will be long lived and which won't be. So whether or not one of htose bits is the true "craft of software engineering" in somebody's eyes has very little interest to me. Especially when it's an anonymous rando.

> people who work with good statically typed languages can prototype quite well using types to drive their domain modelling.

I can certainly believe that's possible. Hopefully some of them will interview with me so I can see how they work. I'm just reporting the data I have.

> that's not really the kind of 'production code' that any reasonable person

In startup contexts I will quite often try an experiment that is quick to build. A few hours is not at all uncommon. That you consider me unreasonable is a sign I can better spend my time elsewhere.

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wpietri4y ago

In this case, the interview problem was a simplified version of a thing the team gets asked to do. So I believe it was as representative as possible for an hour's coding.

yawaraminOP4y ago

> In this case, the interview problem was a simplified version of a thing the team gets asked to do. So I believe it was as representative as possible for an hour's coding.

> I disagree that "real production code" is not throwaway. In situations of high requirements volatility, a great deal of production code ends up getting thrown away

wpietri4y ago

> but it's not the product of the craft of software engineering

> people who work with good statically typed languages can prototype quite well using types to drive their domain modelling.

I can certainly believe that's possible. Hopefully some of them will interview with me so I can see how they work. I'm just reporting the data I have.

> that's not really the kind of 'production code' that any reasonable person

In startup contexts I will quite often try an experiment that is quick to build. A few hours is not at all uncommon. That you consider me unreasonable is a sign I can better spend my time elsewhere.

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