Unix is not an acceptable Unix

Re:Unix is not an acceptable Unix by alkonaut on Monday June 08, 2015 @02:26AM (#9677495)

> Static types require more up-front time investment with the advantage that they save time later.

What exactly is it that saves time? Is it to not have to type as much? In my experience if you use a lang with good type inference you type a lot less with strict typing than without, since you don't have to have unit tests to guard for things like typos/param order/param types.

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Re:Unix is not an acceptable Unix by chongli on Monday June 08, 2015 @10:53AM (#9679439)

Typing on the keyboard is not what takes up most of the time in programming; thinking is. With static types you are forced to put more time into thinking about how to make the program compile whereas in a dynamic scripting language you only care about the result output. Your script may be ill-typed but if it gives the correct output for that situation then it doesn't really matter.

Static types save time later by giving you the opportunity to do a lot of refactoring with high assurance of correctness. Unit tests bring back some of this ability to dynamic languages but they require extra time to write and maintain the tests.

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Re:Unix is not an acceptable Unix by alkonaut on Monday June 08, 2015 @01:30PM (#9680656)

I just can't think of many situations when a dynamically/weakly typed program produces a meaningful result in that case. In my experience the errors are the same in both the (strong/static) case and the (weak/dynamic) case, with the only difference being whether the issue shows up at compile time or runtime. Dealing with N runtime issues is slower than fixing N compiler errors when you discover runtumr problems one at a time, but compiiler errors you get in batches of up to N.

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Re:Unix is not an acceptable Unix by chongli on Monday June 08, 2015 @04:11PM (#9682030)

Then you must not spend much time doing shell scripting. Strong/static types are not much help when everything is a string.

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Re:Unix is not an acceptable Unix by alkonaut on Monday June 08, 2015 @05:42PM (#9682659)

Yes if everything is untyped then types are less useful. And for interactive scripring, compilation feels a bit strange too.

(Of course, I think text-only Unix tools as a way of interacting with a computer is a fundamentally broken idea). Powershell is an interesting idea, though maybe not the best implementation of that idea.

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Re:Unix is not an acceptable Unix by dllthomas on Monday June 08, 2015 @05:53PM (#9682721)

"Yes if everything is untyped then types are less useful."

Everything sharing a common representation does not make types less useful. I would rather my program crash then confuse Bid and Ask prices.

"And for interactive scripring, compilation feels a bit strange too."

I wonder if you've used a REPL for a typed language. I agree that peeling out a compilation step would be odd, but adding types doesn't actually have to change the interaction that much.

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Re:Unix is not an acceptable Unix by icebraining on Monday June 08, 2015 @04:23AM (#9677829)

since you don't have to have unit tests to guard for things like (...) param order (...)

Well,

  precoding :: Int -> Int -> Int -> (Int, Int) -> Precoding

  rsa_dp :: Integer -> Integer -> Integer -> Either RSAError Integer

  compile :: String -> String -> String -> Map Name Interface
             -> Either String (Interface, String)

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Re:Unix is not an acceptable Unix by alkonaut on Monday June 08, 2015 @01:26PM (#9680618)

You can always choose not to use types even when you have them. If a method has multiple args of the same (system) type it's poorly typed, at least in a language that allows type aliases.

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