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Comment by cema | Hacker News Reader

Type based programming does not quite work in weakly typed languages.

I think you should take what he said as saying we should get rid of those

> get rid of those

There are many legitimate uses for scripting languages. It would be impossible and undesirable to get rid of them.

Scripting languages are just that, for plain scripts, not full blown applications.

that's my point. you don't get rid of the tools you use incorrectly, you learn to use them correctly.

I was talking in the context of making full stack applications, not scripts for copying files around, automate software installation and such.

And even there I am most likely to use a ML derivative language than Perl, Python or something else.

What is the correct use of node.js? I claim there is none.

weakly typed != scripting.

Could be implied, of course. Still, there is a noticeable segment who think otherwise (eg a large portion of the Clojure community).

Even in C you can e.g. use singleton structs to distinguish different semantic types.

Didn't you used to be able to use typedef scalars for that? Somewhere that got lost (some name-mangling issue trumped it).

> Didn't you used to be able to use typedef scalars for that?

Oh, I was so disappointed when I realised that those aren't considered distinct types. That ruins half the use of typedef.

Which I am not a big fan of.

I rather use the Algol and ML family of languages, when given the option.