Re:Static typing will not save us from broken software
by pmontra on Sunday October 23, 2016 @04:32PM
(#12775289)
You're right. I autocomplete Ruby with pabbrev in emacs. Basically it remembers what I wrote and suggests me the strings that match the prefix I'm typing. It's great and more that enough. It can't know the number of arguments I have to pass but it rarely matters. All I usually code in Ruby are Rails apps and they are pretty simple, even the ones with dozens of routes and models. Furthermore the location of classes and files is very predictable. There is no need of an IDE to navigate through the code. I came to think that if a language or a framework needs an IDE there is something wrong with it that the IDE must fix.
Re:Static typing will not save us from broken software
by Oreb on Monday October 24, 2016 @06:46AM
(#12777796)
> I've yet to see a Ruby IDE that is much of an improvement on a text editor, whereas Swift is pretty young and already has tooling comparable to much more mature languages.
I've never worked with Ruby, but I do work with (and mostly enjoy) Swift. The one thing I really don't like about Swift is that the currently available tooling (both AppCode and Xcode) is extremely primitive compared to what I am used to from Common Lisp and Clojure.
Re:Static typing will not save us from broken software
by overgard on Monday October 24, 2016 @11:15AM
(#12779533)
Anecdotal data point of one guy's opinion, with no elaboration on reasons? Convincing. I'm talking about WHY analyzing dynamic languages is fundamentally undecidable in many cases without run time knowledge. Trying to do anything other than heuristics on some of these things is about as decidable as the halting problem. The only argument I've heard against this is you can have a hybrid environment with a REPL so your dead code is live. Ok, but you can do the same thing with static typing too.
Re:Static typing will not save us from broken software
by steveklabnik on Sunday October 23, 2016 @04:18PM
(#12775224)
That function looks like this in Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ops/trait.Index.html (it's heavily generic, it could be slightly less verbose if it didn't have to handle Sized)
The compiler will errr if x isn't indexable, or if it is but not by the type of a, in terms of your function's names.
Re:Static typing will not save us from broken software
by mpweiher on Monday October 24, 2016 @04:43AM
(#12777403)
The reason Swift has tooling is that it has a $600 billion company paying for that tooling. Said tooling plugs into Xcode/clang, which is an IDE for, primarily, Objective-C, which happens to be a dynamically typed programming language (with optional static typing).
For my own Objective-Smalltalk, I added code-completion to both the REPL and a few IDEs fairly trivially.
I really don't buy this. Yes different languages present different degrees of difficulty, but the ceiling is much lower for dynamic languages compared to static ones. In dynamic languages, there are absolutely (very common) situations where types cannot be accurately inferred (or inferred at all). If I write
That's practically impossible for an IDE to do anything with.The reason why not every static language has great tool support is more to do with A) if the compiler was designed with hooks/apis for tools to use (like clang and rust do), and B) if the language has enough popularity for anyone to bother. I'm pretty sure if you take two languages of relatively equal popularity, and compare the dynamic one to the static one, the static one almost always has better IDE/tool support. For instance, lets take Swift vs Ruby (they're next to each other on the Tiobe index). I've yet to see a Ruby IDE that is much of an improvement on a text editor, whereas Swift is pretty young and already has tooling comparable to much more mature languages.