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by motorest
455 days ago
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> I've encountered the same phenomenon, and I too cannot explain why it happens. I think that some languages lead developers to think of types as architecture components. The cognitive cost and actual development work required to add a type to a project is not the one-liner that we see in TypeScript. As soon as you create a new class, you have a new component that is untested and unproven to work, which then requires developers to add test coverages, which then requires them to add the necessary behavior, etc. Before you know it, even though you started out by creating a class, you end up with 3 or 4 new files in your project and a PR that spans a dozen source files. Alternatively, you could instead pass an existing type, or even a primitive type? > But even in Typescript codebases I see reluctance to declare new types. Of course. Adding types is not free of cost. You're adding cognitive load to be able to understand what that symbol means and how it can and should be used, not to mention support infrastructure like all the type guards you need to have in place to nudge the compiler to help you write things the right way. Think about it for a second: one of the main uses of types is to prevent developers from misusing specific objects if they don't meet specific requirements. Once you define a type, you need to support the happy flows and also the other flows as well. The bulk of the complexity often lies in the non-happy flows. |
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It's not any languages doing that; it's their company culture doing that.
Java-style languages (esp. those using nominative typing, so: Java, C#, Kotlin, Swift, but not Go, Rust, etc) have never elevated their `class` types as illuminated representations of some grandiose system architecture (...with the exception of Java's not-uncontroversial one-class-one-file requirement); consider that none of those languages make it difficult to define a simple product-type class - i.e. a "POCO/POJO DTO". (I'll pre-empt anyone thinking of invoking Java's `java.beans.Bean` as evidence of the language leading to over-thinking architecture: the Bean class is not part of the Java language any more than the MS Office COM lib is part of VB).
The counter-argument is straightforward: reach for your GoF Design Patterns book, leaf through to any example and see how new types, used for a single thing, are declared left, right and centre. There's certainly nothing "architectural" about defining an adapter-class or writing a 10-line factory.
...so if anyone does actually think like that I assume they're misremembering some throwaway advice that maybe applied to a single project they did 20 years ago - and maybe perhaps the company doesn't have a meritocratic vertical-promotion policy and doesn't tolerate subordinates challenging any dictats from the top.
> Think about it for a second: one of the main uses of types is to prevent developers from misusing specific objects if they don't meet specific requirements.
...what you're saying here only applies to languages like TypeScript or Python-with-hints - where "objects" are not instances-of-classes, but even then the term "type" means a lot more than just a kind-of static precondition constraint on a function parameter.