[mjt0229]

The comments on the blog post are hilarious to me.

"And why do you need type safety? Because you are used to?"

Er. Well, if you like driving a car with no seatbelts, crumple zone, or airbags, I guess that's fine with me. But when I get in a car, I buckle up.

[kod]

That's a somewhat poor analogy, since airbags etc don't prevent you from doing certain driving maneuvers.

Static type systems prevent you from expressing certain programs (I think this is a good thing, but not everyone does).

A better analogy would be antilock brakes or understeer - safer but prevents you from doing certain things.

[to3m]

A better analogy would be driving a car - it's not a tangerine.

[ch]

More like it allows you to accelerate with a pedal on the floor rather than by pulling a string attached directly to the throttle. No loss of flexibility, but you put some trust in the vehicle that you would otherwise have to manage yourself.

[ybx]

A better analogy is the one that's twisted to fit my narrative.

(both you and the parent comment are kinda doing this)

[mjt0229]

Agreed.

[rlander]

Yup, came here to say that!

The

  "If you don't like JavaScript, just use CoffeeScript like everyone else! What's wrong with you?"

reaction made me laugh.

[junke]

The static types protect you from undesired runtime behaviors with respect to OCaml's runtime semantics, but what about Javascript's one?

This is better than nothing, sure, because your code is first checked in OCaml but once the code is running, it does it according to Javascript rules.

I imagine there could be subtle bugs introduced during this process (e.g. your OCaml code manipulate integers, but Javascript has numbers, a.k.a. double floats, as far as I know).

[Drup]

This is no different than trusting the processor for running the emmited assembly according to the model you have for what assembly is supposed to do.

Here, the compiler emits (a subset of) javascript which are assumed to have a semantics, and we trust the browser engine to execute it according to the semantic.

Of course we don't assume the semantic of javascript to be sane, we just assume it follows the spec (and we emit accordingly).

[rlander]

I see your point, but that's like arguing compiled Haskell code is unsafe, since Haskell has type erasure.

Any code generation machinery is subject to subtle bugs and especially so the flesh and bones kind ;)

[e_d_g_a_r]

I haven't had a single problem at all and I've wrapped even the most sensitive stuff like the event emitter itself and streams.

[sgeisenh]

Once you've experienced the joys of parametricity, you can never go back!