38% of bugs at Airbnb could have been prevented by using types

Re:38% of bugs at Airbnb could have been prevented by using ... by 01100011 on Monday February 11, 2019 @02:23AM (#19132635)

Lots of things work when your people and processes are good enough. We don't need seatbelts if we never crash. That can lead to problems with scaling your team if needed, however. At some point you might have to let a moron in, and stronger typing just might be the thing that prevents a catastrophic bug.

I did Python for embedded systems for a year. Python is so expressive and well equipped, but the lack of pre-execution type analysis leaves you vulnerable to severe defects unless your testing coverage is 100%. I would prefer Java over Python just for the safety the compilation step provides(and I don't care for Java). I love programming in Python, but system reliability trumps my personal desires in this case.

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Re:38% of bugs at Airbnb could have been prevented by using ... by hardwaresofton on Monday February 11, 2019 @02:28AM (#19132645)

I'm sure you know this already but you might want to check out:

- https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html

- http://mypy-lang.org

Also flake8 has also helped -- it's just a linter but using it in conjunction with the typing module and running that in a watch loop in another terminal window has done wonders for me.

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Re:38% of bugs at Airbnb could have been prevented by using ... by 01100011 on Monday February 11, 2019 @04:06AM (#19133005)

And that's awesome, but if you're dealing with a large legacy codebase it will take a while to annotate your code.

I love flake8. Properly tuned, it can be a great help. It saved my butt more than once.

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