Comment by 0xbadcafebee
15 hours ago
> I think one of the most eye-opening blog posts I read when getting into programming initially was the evergreen parse, don’t validate post
Bro, that was written in 2019. If it's not old enough to drink it's not yet evergreen. But it's also long-winded. A 25-minute read, and y'know what the conclusion is? "Parsing leaves you with a new data structure matching a type, validation checks if some data technically complies with a type (but might not later be parsed correctly)".
I need all the baby programmers in the back to hear me: type systems are bikeshedding. The point of a type is only to restrict computation to a fixed set. This concept can be applied anywhere you need to ensure reliability and simplicity. You don't need a programming language to natively support types in order to implement the concept yourself in that language.
> You don't need a programming language to natively support types in order to implement the concept yourself in that language.
In a programming language that doesn't enforce types, how do you implement
> "Parsing leaves you with a new data structure matching a type, validation checks if some data technically complies with a type (but might not later be parsed correctly)".