Re:Dart language
by barrkel on Monday October 10, 2011 @09:43AM
(#3093713)
Type are indeed anti-modular - types create huge amounts of coupling across multiple module boundaries in ways that are not easy to wrap up, to componentize, if you will. If you create a module A, but the interface of that module (functions, classes, whatever you might have put in it) uses types from modules B and C, is it not anti-modular?
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Designs are anti-modular. Types are descriptions of the design. They document the (anti-)modularity. Take the types away and you have the exact same anti-modular design as before.
In so far as (a) the language has a static nominative type system and (b) these types describe values that pass between modules, all modules that work with types defined outside the module will require other modules that use the module to also include (implicitly if not explicitly) the module dependencies.
You can get away from this by having a structural type system, or by being dynamically typed (duck typing ultimately being another form of structural typing). But within the constraints of the type system, you can't get away from this by merely changing the design - unless you put everything into a single module, which is the ultimate in anti-modularity.