| > Oh yeah the easiest code in the world to read is some contorted type system and function signatures that look like hieroglyphics that you need a PHd in CS to comprehend. People who just learn programming probably think the same about whatever language they are learning. > No typing system can tell you that you wrote > when you should have written <. The more the compiler can figure out for you, the quicker problems can be identified and fixed. I stopped using python altogether, because it was just infuriating to have the tiniest mistakes blowing up in spectacular and inscrutable ways. Mixing up values of complex types often does not fail at the actual site of the error, but much, much later. Sometimes literally later in time, as in hours, days, or months until you get an obscure "FooType does not Bar" error, and how the thing in question ever became a FooType is inscrutable at that point. If the result even is a runtime error at all! (Bonus points if your production database is now full of junk as well.[1]) The unit test did not catch it because it did not test the offending composition of classes and functions. Meanwhile, a compiler would have caught it immediately: "The thing you're doing here leads to your data structures being nested wrong." When I started using async/await in python, at first it was just over, since in plain python that introduces another layer of typing without any assistance whatsoever. Then I discovered mypy which actually lets me do some amount of static typing in python, and it was very enjoyable and now python is back on the table for smaller projects. There is a reason Haskell has the reputation of "if it compiles, it works". There is a reason why system programmers that work on critical systems are jealously eyeing Rust if their shop still does C. By the way, dependent type systems absolutely can tell you if you wrote > instead of <. But since that usually comes at the expense of not being Turing complete anymore, it's more used for very critical systems, or for theorem provers. [1] Yes sqlite, I'm looking at you. The decision to make database column dynamically typed, and hence have for example an INTEGER column silently accept data that is very much not an INTEGER at all, caused me some grief on a widely deployed system once. |