Comment by thesz
9 hours ago
> AI assisted development isn't all or nothing.
> We as a group and as individuals need to figure out the right blend of AI and human.
This is what makes current LLM debate very much like the strong typing debate about 15-20 years ago.
"We as a group need to figure out the right blend of strong static and weak dynamic typing."
One can look around and see where that old discussion brought us. In my opinion, nowhere, things are same as they were.
So, where will LLM-assisted coding bring us? By rhyming it with the static types, I see no other variants than "nowhere."
As a former “types are overrated” person, Typescript was my conversion moment.
For small projects, I don’t think it makes a huge difference.
But for large projects, I’d guess that most die-hard dynamic people who have tried typescript have now seen the light and find lots of benefits to static typing.
I was on the other side, I thought types are indispensable. And I still do.
My own experience suggest that if you need to develop heavily multithreaded application, you should use Haskell and you need some MVars if you are working alone and you need software transactional memory (STM) if you are working as part of a team, two and more people.
STM makes stitching different parts of the parallel program together as easy as just writing sequential program - sequential coordination is delegated to STM. But, STM needs control of side effects, one should not write a file inside STM transaction, only before transaction is started or after transaction is finished.
Because of this, C#, F#, C++, C, Rust, Java and most of programming languages do not have a proper STM implementation.
For controlling (and combining) (side) effects one needs higher order types and partially instantiated types. These were already available in Haskell (ghc 6.4, 2005) at the time Rust was conceived (2009), for four years.
Did Rust do anything to have these? No. The authors were a little bit too concerned to reimplement what Henry Baker did at the beginning of 1990-s, if not before that.
Do Rust authors have plans to implement these? No, they have other things to do urgently to serve community better. As if making complex coordination of heavily parallel programs is not a priority at all.
This is where I get my "rhyme" from.