Re:Show HN: Aviary.sh – A tiny Bash alternative to Ansible
by 0x8BADF00D on Thursday June 25, 2020 @03:26PM
(#23644499)
A dynamic type system is an incremental improvement over a weakly typed type system, and still will not guard against runtime errors. They are equally dangerous w.r.t runtime errors.
Re:Show HN: Aviary.sh – A tiny Bash alternative to Ansible
by dasyatidprime on Thursday June 25, 2020 @11:59PM
(#23648564)
Not that I endorse the “equally dangerous” comment, but if you're interested in configuration management with a language based around a powerful static type system, may I note the existence of Propellor? https://propellor.branchable.com/
Re:Show HN: Aviary.sh – A tiny Bash alternative to Ansible
by pizza234 on Friday July 03, 2020 @08:51AM
(#23723517)
The concept of "guard against runtime errors" doesn't make much sense.
Technically speaking, even languages with strong safeguards (random examples: Golang, Rust) can't "guard against runtime errors", because it's possible to panic a program by performing an out-of-bounds array access (which classifies as "runtime error" in a very strict sense).
A concept that makes sense is the amount of safeguards provided by a language (/type system), however, this depends entirely on the use case; it's an intentional choice of the developer.
Bash is weakly typed, which is a different concept than dynamic typing.
Dynamically typed languages prevent bugs that weakly typed languages don't, so from this point of view, the latter are unambiguously "more dangerous" than the former.