Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by waffletower 134 days ago
I'm sorry, I don't like to title drop, but I am a Staff Data Engineer and I find that "type driven" development is an inappropriate world view for many programming contexts that I encounter. I use "world view" carefully as it makes a contractual assumption about reality -- "give me what I expect". Data processing does not always have the luxury of such imposition. In these contexts a dynamic and introspective world view is more appropriate, "What do we have here?" "What can we use?". In 2019 I would have felt crippled by use of Haskell in data processing contexts and have instead done much in Clojure in these intervening years, though now LLM assisted use of Haskell toward such tasks would be a fun spectator sport.
2 comments

To amplify what yakshaving said, this may be the worst forum in the entire industry to title drop in. Half the people in any given article's comments are a CxO or Chief or Head or Director or Founder or whatever, or wrote the article, or invented the technology in the article, or are otherwise renowned for something or another.

See also: "Did you win the Putnam?"

> I don't like to title drop, but I am a Staff Data Engineer

I am a Chief Technology Officer[^1].

Your opinion here is common, and misguided.

Here is why: https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2020/01/19/no-dynamic-typ...

---

[^1]: Literally nobody cares.

That's an insular opinion piece that doesn't sway, especially in the age of AI agents, it has not aged well. Its shallow rejection of Rich Hickey's nuance, is also unconvincing. It is a polemical justification for a coding philosophy that is incomplete and dishonest about the benefits of alternatives. Thanks for reminding me that no one cares; important to reinforce that.
That's quite the shallow dismissal, and the bit about AI agents is a particularly weird non sequitur — King's argument is about what type systems can and cannot express. AI agents don't change the relationship between static types and open-world data processing.

It sounds like you're annoyed that Hickey's position was effectively challenged.