[carljv]

I think type systems that try to "close" aggregates (i.e. saying "an Employee is these fields that have these types and no more") kind of do contribute to the problem. I sort of agree that static types are not "causing" such problems. They don't "cause" bad design, but they tend to make it too easy to set bad designs in stone (and most designs are bad in some way). It's not so much about types causing problems or being bad, but having costs, and thinking hard about those costs vs. the benefits. Different folks will, and should, make conclusions for their problems.

I read him as exaggerating his critique a bit because types are often oversold (static type people can be really dismissive of dynamic languages). But I think he's mostly making a "no silver bullet" kind of argument.

[dragonwriter]

> I think type systems that try to "close" aggregates (i.e. saying "an Employee is these fields that have these types and no more") kind of do contribute to the problem. I

They are part of the problem if such types are shared among components; perhaps because of a design in which messages or data transfer object types are tightly coupled with the working representations in components.

But that's an unnecessary form of coupling.

[carljv]

Agreed that's bad. But then if the transit/messaging/persistence components of your systems are independent of the type system (good), to really use your type system you have to do work pushing things in and out of it, in return for type safety (and sometimes not much) that only lasts until the border of your program. It's really easy to over-engineer your types because you want really want to pin down the representation of your problem in the idioms the language gives you. ORM (ab)use is a good example of this, I think.

I've often made the mistake myself of architecting a too-clever type or class system for my problem, and then been faced with writing tons of crap to wrestle it in and out ofprotobufs, etc. that needed to be more general than my problem. When my program was running, it was like, woo, I made some illegal states unrepresentable, which felt great! But I could almost never do that in a way that didn't quickly reveal itself as too brittle.

I like types (mostly). I wish gradual/partial typing was a better solved problem. Clojure's goal is to make it so that you don't over-engineer and tangle up your systems by passing around simple immutable data. If you keep your system nicely decoupled, the types, which are good at finding when I've forgotten a coupling in my code, seem less valuable to me.