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0 pointsfiddlerwoaroof4y ago0 comments

I sort of think there are two mindsets behind this debate: people that miss the guard rails of a static type system and people that enjoy the experience of iterating quickly in a dynamically typed language. I don't really want to say everyone should pick one side or the other, just that my experience doesn't bear out the claim that "statically typed languages produce more maintainable code". And, the little bit of empirical evidence for this proposition is largely inconclusive: https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/

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simion3144y ago

>and people that enjoy the experience of iterating quickly in a dynamically typed language

Programmers spend more time reading code then writing it. So I personally prefer the devs in the team will spend more time typing the code or use a bit more brain energy to think about types so later we can all read the code and understand it and edit faster.

Dynamic works great for write-only scripts.

fiddlerwoaroofOP4y ago

People always say this about reading code and it’s just never matched my experience working in either sort of codebase: one difference (comparing lisps and, say, Typescript or Java) is that lisps just have fewer lines to read. So, any assistance you get from the types is counteracted by having to read more code.

But, additionally, I just don’t find it true to my experience that it’s easier to read and understand a dynamically typed codebase vs. a statically typed one. Especially when you have a lisp-like environment that makes accurate jump-to-definition possible.

EDIT: I think I just tend to think about codebases in terms of operations rather than types. And, consequently, when I build a codebase around compositions of functions, the way I think about it isn’t very different in either paradigm.

simion3144y ago

Maybe it depends on what you work on.

From my experience things go like this

1 we have a simple problem I implement a simple elegant solution

2 some new feature is added, this means there are some special cases now, most of the time someone else in the team adds this new feature , so 4-5 different places are modified, functions need to get more parameters and some IFs are added in those 4-5 places

3 later a new feature is added again, a few more extra special cases again , the dev will again go add some more function parameters here and there , add more IFs but fails to find where all the places that might need to be modified are.

4 things are now a big mess, I have to fix it, and I now have to read all the code, my own old code that was changed with different exceptions and the other developers code. I spend a lot of time on reading stuff, understanding how stuff works now, understand why this new code does some stuff then I spend the time abstracting again a solution, abstracting all the special cases. After I have a solution in mind comes the refactoring, with static types or type hints is much easier to find where stuff is used so you know what to modify.

I am sure one some projects where maybe there is only 1 or few devs that all write quality code and there are no new requirements that need implemented ASAP the code could stay more readable but this is the exception unfortunately.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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simion3144y ago

>and people that enjoy the experience of iterating quickly in a dynamically typed language

Dynamic works great for write-only scripts.

fiddlerwoaroofOP4y ago

simion3144y ago

Maybe it depends on what you work on.

From my experience things go like this

1 we have a simple problem I implement a simple elegant solution

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse