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by josephg
1159 days ago
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> I mostly just find them to be incredibly noisy compared to a well-written function. I really like Ocaml where it's statically typed without needing to actually specify them. Yeah; I haven't worked with ocaml but I've done some haskell (where you think about types so much more). Personally I don't mind rust / typescript's approach of needing types at the function boundary (function input & output types must be specified) while doing inference wherever possible inside each method. As an example, here's a very complex function in a project I'm working on chosen vaguely randomly[1]. The function diffs a run-length encoded DAG using a breadth-first search. Visually scanning for types, there's a couple at the top of the function - both in the function definition and the BinaryHeap: let mut queue: BinaryHeap<(LV, DiffFlag)> = BinaryHeap::new();
But I think thats about it. Maybe there's more manually specified types in "normal" rust because most functions are smaller than that. But, it doesn't feel so bad. In this case I could probably even remove the explicit type annotation for that queue definition if I wanted to, but it makes the compiler's errors better leaving it in.[1] https://github.com/josephg/diamond-types/blob/66025b99dbe390... |
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You definitely still think about types in Ocaml, you just don't need to annotate due to the language design. A big part of what makes it possible is that there are no overloaded operators, eg, you can't add an int and a float without casting as the mathematical operators are different: `1 + 1` v. `1.0 +. 1.0`. While I've dabbled in both, I'm no expert in either Ocaml or Haskell, though.
Really for me it's just that I've never felt the pain as I haven't worked in a big enough project, I guess. There is something that just kind of annoys me about (pseudocode): `(name : string) :: string -> "Hi, #{name}"` because, like, no shit it takes a string and returns a string! It's a death by a thousand cuts thing where I don't want to read that stuff and the compiler doesn't need to be explicitly told that in order to do static analysis.
Anyway, again it's really not the end of the world as I'm not anti-type. I just don't yearn for them in Elixir or anything. If it had a solid typing system I even might use it, but I don't yearn for them or anything.
You have some really interesting projects on your github, though! I mostly build glorified CRUD web apps! I do always get a sense that a lot of the type-talk is centred around organization disorganization.