Comment by troad
7 hours ago
> By Haskell's type system do you mean with all the GHC extensions?
No? What extensions does `A | B | C` require?
> Haskell has neither subtyping nor structural typing
Is subtyping back in? Good news for Java and C++.
Re structural typing, I would ask what behaviour you're after, specifically. For example, this is a valid, typed Haskell function for any two values that can be added, including any user-defined ones:
adder a b = a + b
If by structural typing you mean silently coercing types that the compiler deems structurally equivalent, then no, but I don't think many people writing Haskell would consider that desirable. A `Person` may have an age (40) and a `Wine` may have an age (2005), but you're not going to get sensible results if you start adding those two together, and your compiler should probably stop you.
Structural typing is the sort of thing that is very valuable if you're bolting a type system onto a language with a cornucopia of untyped structs, like JS objects. It is comparatively much less valuable if you're working in a typed ecosystem to begin with, since you're not liable to have loose untyped structs floating around that require coercion.
> "integration/glue" type of programs
It does sound a lot like you're using string literals in lieu of parsing foreign input, which strikes me as a pretty bad idea. Particularly in a language like TS, which is not type safe at runtime, and which will happily ingest an unexpected value, silently coerce it in all sorts of fun and wacky ways, and cause behaviour far removed from what any static analysis of the TS source would suggest.
> You can type a non-empty array that starts with zero
Can you please name me any possible actual use for this? Especially given the type doesn't even exist at runtime and will never be enforced on input data, so this is a once-off check for comptime constants?
OCaml and Scala, both also famously strongly typed functional languages, also have structural typing (OCaml even has many different kinds at many different levels!). Mainstream, Go is based on structural (interface) typing.
The Person/Wine example is a pointless strawman. That's not what structural typing is generally used for.
The entire comment is basically making up strawmans... I didn't give practical examples to save space, obviously, it was just to disambiguate what I meant.
TypeScript has several runtime-safe advanced validators based on its type system (most well-known being Zod), capable of enforcing types similar to what I provided.
To conclude, these type system features were added by multiple experienced language designers for a reason, to languages that already had functional ADTs, so going "huh but what are these even useful for?!" to me sounds a bit clueless (or argumentative), so I don't see a productive continuation to this discussion.
Haha, I knew you'd bring up Go. I even considered pre-emptively dropping Rust and Zig as counterexamples. I think most people who favour static typing consider the duck-typed interfaces of Go to be a mistake. Personally, I consider all of Go to be a mistake.
> these type system features were added by multiple experienced language designers for a reason
Oooh, an appeal to authority, where that authority isn't even named. I'll have you know a famous queen told me you're wrong on this, also for "a reason".
> TypeScript has several runtime-safe advanced validators based on its type system (most well-known being Zod), capable of enforcing types similar to what I provided.
Right, so TS typing is so amazing it requires runtime parser libraries from NPM, and Haskell is less sophisticated because it's not stringly typed.
You realise the entire, complete, exhaustive runtime schema for your zero-first non-empty integer array example looks like this in Haskell, right?
That's a complete function that somehow manages to work without pulling in NPM dependencies. The best JavaScript minds of our generation remain baffled.
> The Person/Wine example is a pointless strawman
> I didn't give practical examples to save space, obviously, it was just to disambiguate what I meant.
So when you use illustrative examples, it is to "disambiguate what you meant" (huh?), and when I do it, they're "pointless strawmen". A little hypocritical, no?
> a bit ignorant
Honestly, I don't think you know what you're talking about at all. You clearly hadn't even read my comment when you started replying with Python and TS examples... that were already in my comment.
It also really sounds like you're using string literals to type input without properly parsing it, which is just a terrible idea. Haskell's type system is designed precisely to protect you from this sort of mistake. [0] No, you're not always going to get what you expect. No, your JS program will never let you know that's the case. No, a sane type system does not require mainlining runtime parser libraries from the biohazardous oceans of NPM. A schema in Haskell is going to be significantly shorter and sounder than anything in Zod, and you don't need a library for it.
As I said above, TS' type system makes sense for a type system bolted onto a dynamic language post facto. TS needs to more tightly link (even mildly conflate) values and types, since it needs to do a lot of clever narrowing to figure out what mad ball of JS it is dealing with at any given time. Haskell does not operate under any such constraint.
> I don't see a productive continuation to this discussion.
Phew. Timesaver.
Of course the irony of all this is that I use TS daily, and Haskell quite rarely.
[0] https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-va...
Yeah, you're just continuing to take whatever was written argumentatively/maliciously as predicted.
Does not seem like this:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Personally, I consider all of Go to be a mistake.
You also consider Scala and OCaml to be mistakes? Because all of what I've mentioned also works in a very similar way in Scala.
> an appeal to authority
No, I didn't appeal to authority. It's the opposite - it's statistics. Multiple experienced language designers don't add features later for nothing. For a similar process, see eg. closures getting added to every mainstream language.
> complete, exhaustive runtime schema
Again, I wasn't talking about runtime schemas, but types. I only mentioned runtime as a counterpoint to the false statement that TypeScript doesn't enforce this. Only reducing this to runtime checking is a fallacy, again.
> A little hypocritical, no?
No, they aren't comparable since I wasn't using the examples as supports for an argument of whether X is better than Y. Strawmen involve argumentation.
> read my comment... examples... that were already in my comment
I read it in detail, the problem is you didn't really read my comment in detail, which illustrated both the subtyping and structural typing aspects (albeit trivially, yes), which yours didn't.
> You're also fairly clearly using string literals to type input without properly parsing it
Okay then, the arrogance of this is pretty astounding... You seem to know what I'm doing better than I am!
To be clear, I'm not doing any of that. And I've written Haskell way before I wrote any TypeScript.
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