[breckinloggins]

> My counter is that when it comes to language design, semantics—what the types mean—are easily 10 times more important than syntax

Sometimes I long for the days before type theory took over programming language research.

[mvdtnz]

You don't need fancy boy theories to see value in types.

[breckinloggins]

I… didn’t say I saw no value in types?

I meant that there was a culture shift around program language research that had given advances in syntax a permanent back seat.

[dismalaf]

The value in types is telling the compiler to make certain assumptions so it can optimize the output.

There's not a ton of value to be had in something like Typescript or Python types.

[horsawlarway]

I think this is a beginner take.

If you only work in small teams, or small projects, I could see this opinion getting formed and maybe agree.

But having worked on large projects... Types are fucking great. So much value exists in simply having a tool that highlights everywhere in the codebase my change impacts.

It makes refactoring at scale possible and expedient in a way that is simply better. Period.

I can be fearless changing things, because I don't have to wonder about all the places my change might have broken - it literally gives me the exact set of files and lines I need to go fix. I don't even have to rely on tests.

It's... Better. It's better even for my personal projects, and it's unimaginably better for my 300 engineer org.

[dismalaf]

And this is a corporate take...

What I don't understand is why, with the myriad of Java-like languages out there (types and all), corporate types still want to Java-ify languages like Ruby... Like, just use Java, Go, Typescript, etc...

It's nice that there's still a language and framework that optimizes for solo devs/small teams and startups.

> It's better even for my personal projects

Does your personal project make money and/or need to be launched quickly? I've also got personal projects in statically typed languages (been playing around a lot with Odin/Vulkan) but those have no due date or expectations. Also declaring types only prevents a very small amount of bugs. And it's not like Ruby doesn't have linters, tests and other tools. Direct feedback from the REPL also makes it easier to write correct code.

Better is also a meaningless word when it comes to software. Does better mean you can ship faster? Or that it's more performant? Unfortunately no language has given us the productivity of a dynamic language with compiled language performance, so everything is a tradeoff...

[gyesxnuibh]

Corporations don't just blip into existence overnight. Startups use a prototyping language fixing the problems and then suddenly you realize you need types and rewriting is a waste of time, money, and a risk to the business.

> Does your personal project make money and/or need to be launched quickly?

This makes it clear that you understand why the language would be chosen in the first place, so not sure why it's not clear that eventually requirements change and you need a way to iteratively improve things while still shipping things.

[dismalaf]

> so not sure why it's not clear that eventually requirements change and you need a way to iteratively improve things while still shipping things.

I've said this a bunch of times in this thread, so here goes again: when I'm at the point where my app is somewhat mature, instead of adding types to it that don't really do anything, I'd rather rewrite parts in a compiled language where the tradeoff actually buys you more performance. Say, Rust, Go or C++.

I started off in data science/stats/econ, where you'd write programs in R then when you hit a bottleneck, rewrite in Fortran or C++. I like that strategy with Ruby too.

I've tried Typescript, it's simply too annoying versus ES6 (which is actually very pleasant). If I were to pick a JS-adjacent language, it would probably be Haxe, because at least the server end could be compiled to native code and sped up (also I wrote small games in it way back). Plus Haxe is actually nice.

My current favourite language is actually Odin, but I know I'm not writing a web app in it. Not when Ruby/Rails gives so much for free and is so productive (thanks to a bunch of "magic" made possible by Ruby's dynamic nature).

I don't disagree with the idea that types languages are nice, I disagree with the idea that bolting a type checker onto a dynamic language is a worthwhile improvement when you already have so many other tools to prevent bugs.

[dragonwriter]

> The value in types is telling the compiler to make certain assumptions so it can optimize the output.

Correctness is more important (in general and as a benefit of type checking) than optimization. Doing the wrong thing fast is easy, but not valuable.

[dllthomas]

Perhaps Devil's advocate, but my rebuttal would be that we're not necessarily comparing similar gains to correctness as to optimisation, and that perhaps the correctness gains can be better attained another way where the optimisation gains cannot.

(Personally I find a type checker tremendously valuable for communicating with myself - and my team, I suppose - about assumptions being made in other parts of the program, which can probably be accounted "correctness".)

[williamdclt]

Yet TS is massively popular. So maybe that’s not the only value?

[dismalaf]

Popular != Good.

Also what's good for enterprise isn't good for everyone.

I get that orgs probably like TS so that newbie devs don't do crazy things in the code, and for more editor hand-holding. But it's not valuable for everyone, if it was actually better than everyone would be using it, not just some people.

[lolinder]

I'm a professional developer with 20 years of experience and I wouldn't dream of starting a new side project—even with myself as the only developer—without types.

I've learned by hard experience that past me was an idiot and future me is clueless. Types are executable documentation that I can leave behind for future me so that future me can get instantaneous feedback while refactoring the project that past me wrote.

[zhisme]

Any reason you stick to ruby? Why not use any statically typed language which offers this feature out of the box? We don't argue against typing. We argue about typing like it is done in ruby rbs/sorbet.