AstonJ

AstonJ

What's all the fuss about static-typing?

If you’re a fan, why?

If you’re not fussed on it, how comes?

Most Liked

Qqwy

Qqwy

To put it very concisely, these are I believe the two most important advantages of static typing:

  1. It removes whole class of potential bugs. Essentially all the undefined is not a function-style bugs are impossible in static type-systems. This means easier testing but also that less ‘defensive programming’ is required.
  2. Knowing that something is guaranteed to e.g. always be an integer allows for extra optimizations to happen.
lpil

lpil

Creator of Gleam

I find this an interesting statement as in my mind Go is a language with a painful lack of inference, types are required everywhere.

Here’s a fully type safe program in Elm:

main =
  let 
    double a = a + a
    twice f a = f (f a)
  in
  { name = ("Louis", "Pilfold")
  , score = twice double 50
  }

And here’s the same program written in Go:

type Name struct{
  First string
  Last  string
}

type Person struct{
  Name  Name
  Score int
}

func Main() Person {
  double := func(a int) int {
    return a + a
  }
  twice := func(f func(int) int, x int) int {
    return f(f(x))
  }
  return Person{
    Name: Name{
      "Louis",
      "Pilfold",
    },
    score: twice(double, 50),
  }
}

The Go version requires many more type annotations, and I would argue that many of them (especially the annotations on anonymous functions) provide no technical benefit at all. If anything they’ll make the code very slightly slower to compile as they need to perform inference inside the compiler to assert that they are correct.

To make matters worse, the Go version isn’t type safe (it lacks null checking and many other features), and it is less flexible (the double function only works with ints).

I like many things about Go, but in my opinion its type system leaves an awful lot to be desired.

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

In addition to what @Qqwy said :

  • The sum types – like Option and Result in Rust – allow for, and mandate, exhaustive pattern matching which is missing in e.g. Elixir, and that leads to a lot of code being written exclusively for the happy path.

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

AstonJ
What chair do you have while working… and why? Is there a ‘best’ type of chair or working position for developers?
New
Exadra37
Cloudflare as workers to run serverless code without using containers: So it seems that Isolates is based on: What we ended up settl...
New
Exadra37
So, if we can reduce the likelihood, we can reduce the overall risk. That’s good. It’s actually very similar to a very common idea called...
New
AstonJ
It’s great to see how popular some of these channels have become - do you have any favourite YouTuber devs? Ben Awad Code...
New
AstonJ
Do you think it’s worth worrying about? Do you think it’s going to be an even bigger issue in future? If so what can the teams of smaller...
New
DevotionGeo
The V Programming Language Simple language for building maintainable programs V is already mentioned couple of times in the forum, but I...
New
New
foxtrottwist
A few weeks ago I started using Warp a terminal written in rust. Though in it’s current state of development there are a few caveats (tab...
New
DevotionGeo
For me it’s six to seven steps above complete dark, on MacBook Air M1.
New
jaeyson
Hi!, hope everyone’s ok. Sorry if this question is ambiguous (i’ll remove this if i break some rules here). This is more like a self-ques...
New

Other popular topics Top

AstonJ
A thread that every forum needs! Simply post a link to a track on YouTube (or SoundCloud or Vimeo amongst others!) on a separate line an...
New
ohm
Which, if any, games do you play? On what platform? I just bought (and completed) Minecraft Dungeons for my Nintendo Switch. Other than ...
New
DevotionGeo
I know that these benchmarks might not be the exact picture of real-world scenario, but still I expect a Rust web framework performing a ...
New
axelson
I’ve been really enjoying obsidian.md: It is very snappy (even though it is based on Electron). I love that it is all local by defaul...
New
DevotionGeo
I know that -t flag is used along with -i flag for getting an interactive shell. But I cannot digest what the man page for docker run com...
New
AstonJ
Thanks to @foxtrottwist’s and @Tomas’s posts in this thread: Poll: Which code editor do you use? I bought Onivim! :nerd_face: https://on...
New
AstonJ
This looks like a stunning keycap set :orange_heart: A LEGENDARY KEYBOARD LIVES ON When you bought an Apple Macintosh computer in the e...
New
AstonJ
Saw this on TikTok of all places! :lol: Anyone heard of them before? Lite:
New
mafinar
This is going to be a long an frequently posted thread. While talking to a friend of mine who has taken data structure and algorithm cou...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Fight complexity and reclaim the original spirit of agility by learning to simplify how you develop software. The result: a more humane a...
New