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A comment on The type system is a programmer's best friend. Parent comment

Re:The type system is a programmer's best friend by AnimalMuppet on Saturday November 05, 2022 @01:33PM (#33483606)
The tradeoff is that I have to explicitly say (and know) what type I'm dealing with at every point in the program.

But I'm not sure that's much of a tradeoff. If I don't know what type this thing is, how do I know what operations I can safely do on it? How do I know that I can make it do what I'm trying to do? Or will it blow up at runtime when I do that?

I consider "I coded it, it's done, but it might blow up at runtime" to be highly unprofessional. "We covered that with unit tests" is theoretically OK, if you've got 100% test coverage. But you don't, and you never will.

Having to say everywhere what the type is gets tedious. Autocomplete (and "auto", for those languages that have it) help a bit here, but only a bit.

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Re:The type system is a programmer's best friend by pca006132 on Saturday November 05, 2022 @02:12PM (#33484045)
Most modern languages can do type inference and doesn't require explicit type annotation for variables. Hack, even C++ gots auto! For declarations, I think it does make sense to ask for the annotation because it can also serve as documentation. Have you ever tried scala, rust, haskell or typescript?
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