[tikhonj]

Yeah, Java is not a fair example. It has a type system with the worst compromise between being awkward (and infamously verbose) and not very effective: it gets the short end of the stick on both accounts. It's better than C, granted, but that's saying nothing. It does not compare to a good type system like Scala's or especially Haskell's.

Good type systems can catch far more bugs than you imagine. Moreover, they can actually make writing code easier: there are some extremely valuable and expressive features like typeclasses that simply cannot be reproduced in a dynamically typed language.

[yxhuvud]

You are totally missing the point of the parent. Just because types work out doesn't mean the behavior of the program is correct.

The problem is not how to make something compile, regardless of how complex the types are. The problem is how to do the right thing. It is not enough to return a string - you must return the correct string, and that is not normally not something a type can solve for you. I suppose you may solve that problem too in haskell, but then you will get bugs in the type definition instead. TANSTAAFL.

[jerf]

"It is not enough to return a string - you must return the correct string, and that is not normally not something a type can solve for you."

It can, however, ensure that you have returned a legally-formatted email address instead of someone's first name, with proper use of the type system. You'd probably be surprised what you can do with a real type system, based on what you're saying here. It is not a proof of correctness, but there's a great deal more possible than in Java.

It of course can not ensure you returned the correct email address, but often that's a much less pressing problem, because the thing returning the address may very well have had only one address in hand to chose from, in which case it can't be wrong. There's a lot of logic like that you can deploy in Haskell, when scopes and inputs to functions are much more carefully controlled than a traditional language.

[tmhedberg]

Nowhere in his post did tikhonj suggest that compilation == correctness, even in Haskell. Of course it isn't. The only people making that assumption are wyqueshocec's coworkers, and naturally they're getting burned as a result.

The key point is that a sufficiently expressive type system gets you far closer to correctness on the basis of type checking alone than does a weaker static system like Java's or a dynamic one like JS's. You should still write tests, you just won't have to write as many in order to reach the same degree of confidence in your code.