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A comment on Why Maybe Is Better Than Null. Parent comment

Re:Why Maybe Is Better Than Null by yew on Friday April 19, 2013 @01:59PM (#5577875)
That's the main problem with calling Maybe 'better'. If you don't have static type checking then either you implement it just for Maybe or you end up with the same sorts of problems as you had before.

Making types non-Nullable by default is nice, though. Even in a dynamic language you can have a syntactic distinction to make interfaces more explicit.

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Re:Why Maybe Is Better Than Null by cantankerous on Friday April 19, 2013 @02:58PM (#5578148)
True. I think it's also a covert argument for static type checking, though ;-).
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Re:Why Maybe Is Better Than Null by yew on Friday April 19, 2013 @03:28PM (#5578289)
Give me a statically typed Python and a type system that can handle external hardware poking around in its memory and I'm in ;)

I'm sort of a fan of Haskell already, to tell you the truth.

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Re:Why Maybe Is Better Than Null by dllthomas on Friday April 19, 2013 @04:37PM (#5578587)
> Give me a statically typed Python

Not sure that's so far from Haskell, really... :-P

> and a type system that can handle external hardware poking around in its memory

Can it be in isolated places? That's doable...

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Re:Why Maybe Is Better Than Null by yew on Friday April 19, 2013 @05:14PM (#5578740)
Not sure that's so far from Haskell, really... :-P

Maybe it's my lack of experience talking. Haskell feels heavier in a lot of places. I think the focus on compilation in the backend is almost a downside here, too.

Can it be in isolated places? That's doable...

Depends on the application. There's a lot of hardware out there that does really weird stuff. There's some interesting work in Haskell-space (eg Atom) but I don't know how comprehensively mature it is.

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Re:Why Maybe Is Better Than Null by merijnv on Saturday April 20, 2013 @07:35AM (#5581057)
I actually started designing statically typed Python, since it seemed a fun exercise. Halfway in I realised I was effectively redesigning Haskell with slightly different syntax and stopped.
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