Comment by ajkjk
1 day ago
I don't think ... serious people... argued that.
That's a bit hyperbolic so I'm sure I'm wrong, but I have an ace: if you point me at very smart people who argued against types I'm gonna say that they weren't serious. I think it's not possible, if you have the relevant experience of working on both typed and untyped codebases of at least moderate complexity with at least one collaborator, to come away seriously believing that the untyped way is superior (unless you were forced to use a really bad typed language, I guess). And arguing that untyped languages are better without that experience is also not serious, in the sense that anyone can unseriously say anything if they don't care about being well-informed enough to be right.
I worked with people who would consider themselves serious, and are still in the industry and doing fine. A few have certainly gone on to be more prominent and get paid a lot more than I am—not that it's a perfect measure of seriousness.
In the early days they would often say things like "but we have prop types, why use TypeScript", "why not use JSDoc" (this made no sense at the time), or "it's an exercise in needless complexity". It was really tough to sell them on TypeScript for years.
I think there are developers who are very goal-oriented with a narrow perspective on getting from point A to point B, and their understanding of the process isn't particularly holistic, rigorous, or geared towards external or knock-on factors like maintainability, performance, bugs, etc. They deal with it when circumstances force them to, and no sooner. Defining types is a complete waste of time to someone like that.
These people thrive where teams are primarily expected to just ship things, and in my experience they often hate needing to think about things like types, tests, or code quality beyond running a linter.
So, they're serious people in one school of thought. They contribute meaningfully to projects. I think they're a large constituent of the new class of vibe coders who laugh at you if you look at the code. That's fine, they're doing their thing, and there are more than a few ways to get programs into people's hands. That way just isn't the way I like to.
Serious developers can make a serious argument that you can get quality production-level code with other ways besides explicit enforced type systems (eg. that if you have good enough test coverage such explicit type systems are a redundant waste of time).
Obviously "production quality" varies greatly from shop to shop, but I think there's more legitimacy to the idea than you're giving it.
I didn't mean to paint with such a broad stroke, there. I've worked with people who are capable of writing exceptional software without type systems or other abstractions. I'm not that smart, though. I need a lot of guard rails to keep myself from doing stupid things. I was speaking more generally about people who didn't produce exceptional code yet still weren't open to means of improving their work if it meant having to open their minds to new ways of working.
This is totally fine sometimes though, because like you say, there are shops where this type of execution is suitable. It's why vibe coding is actually okay in many cases; it's not a lot different from what it replaces in these cases. There are a lot of situations where this is the bar, it produces enough utility an value, and that's great.
Look at some of the typing present in MS COM back in the IE5/6 days and we can discuss more. I can honestly tell you - I'll take untyped languages any day of the week over that clusterfuck.
Personally - I also think people really underestimate just how much the tooling around types has improved over the last 20 years.
If I'm having to try to look up the difference between iBrowserInterface6 and iBrowserInterface5 and iBrowserInterface4... (and yes - shit like this really did exist: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/shdeprec...)
And I have no tooling for autocomplete, and the docs are shoddy, and google is just coming on the scene...
People understandable want to throw their computer out the window.
Types are great. Some forms of them were not.
completely agree. but I felt like even then it was clear that types were a good idea and the implementations were not. For instance I started programming on Java 4 or 5 and the types were pretty bad---but still it was obviously the right way to go compared to JS or, god forbid, shell.
"even then it was clear that types were a good idea and the implementations were not"
I still feel this way about the state of the art. I want solid type support in my language ... but I do not feel TypeScript is the best possible implementation at all, and for many situations I feel implicitly typed (but still using all of VS Code's type features) Javascript is actually better than using TypeScript.
I eagerly await the day when someone actually gets a JS typing tool right and I prefer using it over raw Javascript.
> but still it was obviously the right way to go compared to JS or, god forbid, shell.
I just don't think this is true.
Frankly - it's hard to argue this at all (even today) given that JS is the dominate language on the planet, and it lacks types... as does python, which had a reputation for decades as THE language to use to teach new folks to code. Or take PHP which dominated server development for a LOOONG time: also lacks types. Ruby on Rails has a wonderful reputation as the "get shit done" framework: no types.
Types are good for modern software companies, where code size has ballooned up very high (common to work on a codebase with hundreds of thousands of lines) or teams are large (50+ developers) and terrible if you just want to hammer out something that works as a solo dev.
Do I like types today? Sure - the tooling is solid, and I work on large codebases with large teams.
Did I like types as a solo dev at 3 person startup? no.
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Java has a lesson of what can go wrong with types, just as parent says. That example is dates and times. So many types…
And before Java finally settled on what we have today, we had 3rd-party libraries like jodatime that tried to fix it.
I guess it’s in a good state today, but it took a LocalDateTime.MAX to get there. I mean an Instant.MAX. No, I mean an OffsetDateTime.MAX. No, I mean new Date(Long.MAX_VALUE). Oh wait I meant new Timestamp(Long.MAX_VALUE). No, I mean LocalTime.MAX.
I’ll stop now, but i could go on.
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Why the past tense? COM is the main Windows API surface since Windows Vista, most Win32 C stuff is frozen in Window XP API surface, with minor improvements.
WinRT for all its pain points, is still COM, only with a different set of base interfaces, and using .NET metadata instead of classical COM type libraries.
This isn't a good example at all. Those interfaces are subtypes.
It's easy to say that now, but it used to be that all mainstream typed languages had absolutely terrible type systems that got in your way as much as they helped
Absolutely, TypeScript is remarkably expressive in my opinion. The inference and option to bail out with `any` is nice for some teams in some cases, too. They did an excellent job of making it accessible.
They're still right here in sibling comments
guess so. I still don't think their position is serious, but, that's just me.
was amusing to come back hours later and find out whether this comment ended up more upvoted or more downvoted, it was oscillating all day...
> I don't think ... serious people... argued that.
Static vs dynamic typing is no less ubiquitous in online forums over the decades than tabs vs spaces and vim vs emacs.
I feel like I see all of these debates far less than I used to? Well I don't see anyone arguing about vim and emacs anymore at all, and spaces have mostly won over tabs, and static typing has mostly won over dynamic, with the holdouts being comparative novices and people who program in less modern environments, like in academia and at smaller companies.
Are the banks and trading firms that use e.g. Clojure/Elixir/Erlang/Python "comparative novices" or "less modern", whatever that means? These are some of the most sophisticated shops I've ever seen, doing some serious software engineering. I like static types as much as the next person and have written probably more Rust and Scala than anything else, but this seems maybe a bit of a gross generalization.
Yeah, we are definitely past the hey day of these debates, though you can still find them.
e.g. Gradual typing was since added to PHP and Python which ended some debate like how linting tools shut down a lot of whitespace debates.
Spaces over tabs? Since when?
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I've been writing code since the 80s, professionally since the mid 90s, in almost every major language, platform and operating system, from 8 bit microcontrollers to large scale web platforms.
So, not sure that counts as "serious" in your estimation, but I would definitely argue that dynamically typed languages are superior for a large class of problems.
Also, just a tip: it's usually better to be less sure of yourself, and seek to understand other's reasoning. It'll get you a lot farther than trying to convince everyone of how right you are.
If you're not sure why an experienced developer would hold an opinion different than yours, why not just ask?
....they did ...and... the camp still exists
well, as I said, I don't take them seriously :p