Re:The Next Step for Generics
by pwm on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @04:28AM
(#23549137)
This misses the point of why expressive type systems matter. Beginners and hobbyist (and i’m using these labels in the best possible sense) play with these things, push bounderies, etc... Professionals (in the literate sense, ie. people getting paid for it) tend to just solve problems whilst being fully aware that they have many powerful tools in their arsenal if/when the need arises. If you have a pro who is constantly lost in type-golfing land then that’s a problem.
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Check out type-driven development (there’s some good F# example blogs) - honestly it’s like TDD on steroids. Having no type system scares me now, having worked in a Python startup before moving to a Haskell shop and seeing the difference in development quality (speed is surprisingly similar too).
I think we are on the same page. I also write Haskell for food. What I'm saying is that if you write Haskell professionally and types slow you down, ie. you always try to come up with the best possible abstraction for everything, then that's a problem. It should do the opposite: give you wings while prototyping, iterating fast and refactoring(!!) as well as great comfort knowing that you have all its amazingly powerful tools in your arsenal if and when you need them.
That seems to idealize professionals quite a bit. In reality, professionals are capable of much pedantry, not to mention political posturing. Some languages give greater scope for these than others.