Diminishing returns of static typing

Re:Diminishing returns of static typing by amirouche on Monday October 02, 2017 @12:41PM (#15385366)

I agree that static typing helps reading comprehension and that IDEs like pycharm help getting into big code bases, that said, at the end of the day, when you know the code both the IDE and static typing are getting in the way. Actually, I never saw anybody as quick as people using simple editors like emacs and vim. GUI is getting in the way of the programmers intent. Static typing is a hindrance in front of refactoring. Unit tests is the only truth that matters, static typing or not.

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Re:Diminishing returns of static typing by always_good on Monday October 02, 2017 @01:09PM (#15385698)

You're kinda damning it with faint praise when you say that you can use dynamically typed languages on small projects that fit in your head (and are also probably written by a single developer).

You can pretty much use any language in that scenario. But the chickens come to roost around day 30+ or so.

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Re:Diminishing returns of static typing by icebraining on Monday October 02, 2017 @01:43PM (#15386022)

A large project is a poorly decoupled set of small projects.

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Re:Diminishing returns of static typing by orthecreedence on Monday October 02, 2017 @05:18PM (#15388050)

True, once my libraries get bigger than five or six assembly instructions, I tend to break them down to a more manageable size.

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Re:Diminishing returns of static typing by always_good on Monday October 02, 2017 @09:19PM (#15389335)

May be.

Meanwhile real-world non-trivial projects tend to be large projects.

Nice to be prepared for that instead of gambling on "surely we'll extract out smaller projects that fall on the right abstraction boundaries in the face of unknown future requirements."

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Re:Diminishing returns of static typing by ubernostrum on Monday October 02, 2017 @02:06PM (#15386259)

Personally I'd only use a language like C or C++ or Java for a tiny puny baby child's toy program. They're fundamentally unfit for real-world codebases.

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Re:Diminishing returns of static typing by KMag on Monday October 02, 2017 @02:29PM (#15386458)

I'm probably being trolled, but I'll bite.

How big are the "real-world codebases" you're talking about, and how many programmers are working on the code? Once you hit 5-10 million lines of code and/or thousands of developers, static typing really helps manage complexity.

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Re:Diminishing returns of static typing by ubernostrum on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @10:56AM (#15392810)

It's more that I get tired of this argument and decided to try to pre-emptively spoil it.

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Re:Diminishing returns of static typing by naasking on Monday October 02, 2017 @01:50PM (#15386087)

> Unit tests is the only truth that matters, static typing or not.

Well that's provably false, because there exist properties that you can type check that literally can't be verified via unit tests, even in principle. For instance, race and deadlock freedom.

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Re:Diminishing returns of static typing by tome on Monday October 02, 2017 @05:08PM (#15387962)

> Static typing is a hindrance in front of refactoring.

Are you kidding? Python programming's my day job but Haskell is an order of magnitude easier to refactor.

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