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0 pointschubot4y ago0 comments

Code that passes type checks can also fail to solve the user's problem, make 10,000 database calls, or render a page that is completely unreadable.

The human in the loop is a good thing. All things being equal, the type system is also a good thing, but what usually happens is that you end up checking your page once a minute or once every 10 minutes, not 50 times in a minute. That difference can make or break a project.

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lolinder4y ago

It depends a lot on what you're working on. If you are building a front end with PHP as your templating language, then yes, the ability to instantly see your changes is huge. In my experience, when working on back end, the difference isn't that significant because you really want to be using unit tests anyway, not constantly interacting with the front end to test your work. In those back end cases, having a strong type system makes a huge difference.

I'm working on a project that has a legacy PHP code base and a new JVM code base. What kind of naturally happened is that we end up doing most of our front end work in PHP and all of our new backend work on the JVM.

noduerme4y ago

I've rewritten a ton of legacy PHP services / page generation code into NodeJS over the last couple years. I know PHP inside-out and love it the way you love... um, something fugly like an old futon. It's really nice to be working in Typescript on both ends now, to have share modules and data models between server and client codebases. But one thing I do miss about PHP is not needing to make sure the server restarts on every backend code change. Nodemon and PM2 are both pretty good about this, but it's that one out of ten times they don't restart and I spend a minute or two wondering what I missed before realizing they didn't restart; happens a few times a week and drives me up the wall.

chubotOP4y ago

Yeah I definitely agree that it's domain specific, and I was really talking about front ends (hence "checking your page").

User interfaces, data science, and security/reverse engineering work are three domains that really require tight feedback loops. The work I did on parsing shell [1] is basically a kind of blackbox reverse engineering, and was done with < 100 ms feedback loops.

[1] https://www.oilshell.org/blog/tags.html?tag=parsing-shell#pa...

the_gipsy4y ago

And for those cases you should use tests, not a manual procedure.

Of course you will need some manual procedure, and e2e tests, but not “50 times a minute”. That is just frustrating.

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