Re:Things I Was Wrong About: Types
by hohohmm on Sunday September 27, 2020 @05:17AM
(#24605319)
The benefits of types is not something to be discovered, but something that's taught in school with very convincing arguments, if not too much zeal. It's interesting to see this kind of post. Not to be sarcastic about the late discovery of typed goodness, but the fact that this is not already a concensus in the engineering world.
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Re:Things I Was Wrong About: Types
by christophilus on Sunday September 27, 2020 @05:37AM
(#24605414)
It’s not a consensus because many of us have found that types are not the panacea we were taught. Erlang is a fantastic language, and it’s arguable that types would not improve it, but rather hinder some of its better features. Same is true for Smalltalk and various lisps. I think there’s a place for various approaches to types.
All lisps I used could be statically typed, I think? Does elisp used typep?
For small projects, hacks or emacs macros types are not useful but the possibility of adding types is there.
[Edit:and it's useful when your finite state machine grows to much]