Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by valenterry 1073 days ago
> Also that data was rather lacking on, say, real world examples of Hindley-Milner type systems. So maybe those actually work well in practice.

That is of course a bit disappointing, because anything below HM is _certainly_ not what I call advanced. But Google must be using some languages that use HM or a variant no? How comes there is no data about those.
1 comments
btilly 1072 days ago
When I was there, the three most widely used languages were C++, Java and Python. So that type of language had the most data. And so the analysis that I read focused on them.

Within those languages, projects that did a good job of KISS fared better than those which didn't. This lead to a discouragement from using advanced features. You'll see that bias in style guides like https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html.

link
valenterry 1072 days ago
Well, none of those 3 languages are what I would consider "an advanced high-level language". C++ is not high-level by my definition and python and Java are certainly not advanced - well maybe Java has an advanced typesystem compared to Go, but not compared to the state of the art.

So I'm not surprised by the results, if the majority of the data came from those languages. That doesn't invalidate anything, it just changes the scope and can't be really used to backup your argument imho.

link