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by refulgentis 196 days ago
> Type systems were pretty uncool before Scala

I’m not up on programming language engineering as much as I should be at 37, could you elaborate a bit here? (To my untrained ear, it sounds like you’re saying Scala was one of the first languages that helped types break through? And I’m thinking that means, like, have int x = 42; or Foo y = new Foo()”
1 comments
hunterpayne 196 days ago
Not types, type-safety. Things like covariant and contravariant type declarations, implicit types (variables looked up by type instead of by label), and other things that you need to make a type safe system/service/application. The problem is that that feature of a language is massively oversold. Its nice but to pretend it prevents bugs or is even a great design goal is questionable and not backed up by research (as they claim).
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dionian 196 days ago
But it’s still a way more powerful and expressive type system than Java. So using it in a JVM ecosystem is a perfect fit.
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still_grokking 195 days ago
> Its nice but to pretend it prevents bugs or is even a great design goal is questionable and not backed up by research (as they claim).

That's why people use JavaScript instead of Rust for critical systems, right?

Claiming in the year 2025 that strong static types don't provide massive advantages is almost laughable, TBH. This was settled long ago, and the whole industry now understands that type safety is inevitable to create reliable and scalable systems.

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