[m12k]

I've only been in the industry for ~15 years, but it still feels like every year, some ecosystem discovers the value of something that another ecosystem has taken for granted for decades - type-checking, immutability, unidirectional data-flow, AOT-compilation, closures, pure functions, you name it. I'm glad we seem to be converging on a set of best practices as an industry, but sometimes I wish we were spending less time rediscovering the wheel and more time building on top of and adding to the actual state of the art.

[taeric]

I've been alive long enough to see that most things are useful, and all things are oversold.

More, the nice easy things to build with major restrictions pretty much gets thrown out the window for complicated things that have constraints that most efforts don't have. This isn't just a software thing. Building a little shed outside? Would be silly to use the same rigor that goes into a high rise. Which would be crazy to use the same materials engineering that goes into a little shed.

[Zababa]

The metaphor doesn't really works, as in software lots of high rise start as a little shed.

[taeric]

Quite the contrary, in my opinion. Lots of what makes various parts of the physical hard are in the infrastructure surrounding them. This is very similar to the complexity in software setups.

Take game systems, as an example; far far more effort will be spent in the art and general asset management than is true for many business software setups. Which is why many of the business best practices haven't necessarily moved over to games.

Similarly, look at the general practices around building and maintaining bridges in physical world. We call all bridges by the same name, but reality basically dictates that what works in some locations cannot and will not work in others.

Now, you are right that we can grow large software out of smaller in ways that the physical can't do. But, it is a common fallacy to stall out a project by trying to be at google's scale from the start. Ironic, in many ways, as not even google was built to be at their scale from the start.

[Zababa]

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Something like "the software world is complex, and so is the physical world, so comparing the two makes sense"? If that's what you meant, you're right, but the problem is that comparing the two doesn't lead to better insight in those. If that's not what you meant, then sorry, I didn't understand.

I think that in general we should stop using so much metaphors in the software world. There's no need to go look for a shed. If we had to statically type and test every shell commands we typed, we would lose lots of productivity. On the other hand, maintaining those very large scripts that started as a simple line and are now used for deploying all of our application, and tend to fail in surprising ways, would be easier.

The other problem with metaphors is that they are also hard to refute. I've never built a shed, nor worked on a high rise. I don't see why that experience would be relevant to building software, or necessary in a discussion about static typing.

[taeric]

I'm claiming that most of the complications that will actually influence many of the intrinsic choices of both, will be dictated by external factors. Static typing being an intrinsic fact of software, I couldn't tell you what most of the software I use, used.

Calling for lack of metaphor is interesting. In many ways, our industry is nothing but metaphors, so it is surprising for me to see them called down.

I agree that no metaphor is perfect. But, by that same logic, I would argue that no specified type is perfect. Especially if done so in a taxonomy that does not admit exceptions. (And again, I'm not against types.)

[Zababa]

> Calling for lack of metaphor is interesting. In many ways, our industry is nothing but metaphors, so it is surprising for me to see them called down.

I don't think that's true. There are lots of metaphor because people love using metaphors, but it's not inherent to our industry. Abstraction is, but abstraction and metaphors are different. Metaphors seem to mostly come from blog-post type content, where people want to give you an intuition for something in less than 10 minutes. There's a really good article about this, in the context of monad tutorials, which are some of the most proheminent victims of these metaphors https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti....

> I agree that no metaphor is perfect. But, by that same logic, I would argue that no specified type is perfect. Especially if done so in a taxonomy that does not admit exceptions. (And again, I'm not against types.)

I would call types an abstraction rather than a metaphor, though I agree with you that they are not perfect, in that all abstractions trade precision and exhaustiveness for speed. There are interesting alternatives to this with property-based checking and whatever clojure.spec is, and type systems themsleves are getting better, but we're still not at perfection. And even then, I don't think we will ever reach it. The "best" type systems currently all seem to have some structural parts, and some nominal parts, so there's no silver bullet.

I mostly use types to avoid stupid mistakes (I make lots of typos, and Typescript helps a lot here), and to improve developer tooling. I'd like to try some approach with DDD and types, but my current company isn't big on DDD, so I can't really judge it. I also like using unit and integration tests. All of these make me feel safer when doing changes. But some people are fine with catching errors in production and quickly fixing them.

[munificent]

> Take game systems, as an example; far far more effort will be spent in the art and general asset management than is true for many business software setups. Which is why many of the business best practices haven't necessarily moved over to games.

You're right that game development involves a lot of asset stuff that other business software doesn't have to worry about as much. (And, conversely, a lot of business software has to worry about large mutable datasets much more than most games.)

But I don't think that has much bearing on why some business software practices haven't made their way to games. I think the reasons are mostly:

* Games are structurally different from business software, so the patterns that work for the latter aren't always great for the former. MVC makes sense when the "UI" is a relatively thin layer insulated from the "logic". In most games, the "UI" (rendering, animation, VFX, audio, etc.) is huge and more deeply coupled to the game state.

* A lot of enterprise software practices are about maximizing developer productivity in a single codebase over a very long period of time at the expense of runtime performance. Game codebases often have a shorter lifespan and can't afford to sacrifice runtime speed for developer speed.

* Game developers can be insular and are often either oblivious to what's going on outside of games or think it's beneath them and not applicable to their "real" code.

[taeric]

I can't say with any authority on why practices are different between the different environments. So, to that end, I should have offered it as /a/ reason, as I don't think it is the sole one. I can't shake that it contributes, though. I mainly meant it is a counter to the implicit "devs at office job are too lazy to learn different ways."

For other examples, I would dip into major logistical simulations/optimizations. Which basically drop into linear algebra as soon as they can, where much of the idea of typing is basically thrown out, so that we can solve equations and constraints, with no real tracking of which is which at different locations. There is a tranlation in/out, but once in, things are effectively "matrix of values.

(As an amusing aside, I love that I get to message with the authors of books I'm reading on places like this. I have your Crafting Interpreters. Working through it at a glacial pace. Plan to pick up the other one next. Kudos and thanks!)

[munificent]

You're welcome! :)

[nllsh]

Not that I disagree, but I feel like you are overselling the simplicity of [building a shed](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding).

[taeric]

My point is that all methods and techniques probably have worked for someone doing something.

And I should have leaned in on how much is still left to implementation in terms of "shed." From weather, to what is being stored. It isn't like there is a universal shed design that will make everyone happy.

Nor is this saying that some things aren't truly valuable. Just recognize that some places they don't help as much as you would like. This isn't saying they are bad or worthless. Just acknowledging that they are oversold.

[d0mine]

Programming is sufficiently complex field that we can find examples when the opposite things are the best: it depends on context whether you need more or less types.

[axiosgunnar]

I think the problem is to figure out what the best practices actually are.

What we are observing here is „the market fixing it“.

The process is messy and redundant, but effective.

[AlexCoventry]

I think the limiting factor in the case of python getting type hints was that it was never designed for type safety in mind, and that it took a while to establish consensus on a good type-hinting system.

I don't think it's a matter of reinventing the wheel, in this case, more a matter of bolting something like a wheel on a system which didn't start with wheels.

[jeffbee]

Yes, and when that ecosystem discovers these obvious facts, the discovery is always described as a "journey" in the accompanying blog post. Having sense and good taste at the beginning of a project doesn't warrant a blog post but slowly stumbling over isolated aspects of good taste, now that's a journey.