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0 pointswavemode9mo ago0 comments

The classical counterargument to this is that, if you have good test coverage then eliminating @name should lead you directly (via failing tests) to where the name field was being used. This works especially well in codebases which enforce what I tend to call "pseudo"-type systems, for example via clojure's spec and Racket's contracts. Where the shape of data is enforced structurally at runtime.

To be honest, the argument in favor of static typing that I find more compelling is the IDE argument. It definitely is a much richer experience browsing code in an IDE with the benefit of hovering over values and knowing their type, ctrl-clicking to go to where something is defined, et cetera. The equivalent of this interactive experience for dynamically-typed languages was supposed to be the REPL. But I feel like true REPL-driven development has mostly fallen by the wayside, and most environments don't have great support for it.

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acoard9mo ago

Yes, the type system basically replaces a degree of unit tests. You no longer need unit tests that are basically just type checking. And it's more comprehensive too. It's much easier to have incomplete test coverage without knowing it than an invalid type system. With such a type system, the app will fail to compile. Of course, you still need unit tests for many other things, but the type system does remove a class of them.

Whether typechecking or unit tests is "better" is really a question of taste.

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acoard9mo ago

Whether typechecking or unit tests is "better" is really a question of taste.

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