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Comment by trishume | Hacker News Reader

I agree it's definitely an interesting result and a point in favour of dynamic languages.

A caveat is that I'm pretty sure my friend intentionally sacrificed code quality to do it, I don't think you'd find that project as readable and understandable as the others. Another caveat is that you have to be okay with your codebase being extremely magical and metaprogramming-heavy, which many industrial users of dynamic languages avoid.

As I mention, I'm personally into statically typed languages mostly for the performance and correctness benefits. I think it's plausible that on larger projects with teams the correctness benefits save enough debugging time that overall implementation time is lower, but I'm less confident in this now than I was before this comparison.

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I've read my share of cryptic JavaScript written by others and in that sense I agree that in multi-person long-term projects static typing no doubt will have its advantages.

My hunch is however that what is often overlooked in development with statically typed languages is that it takes considerable time and effort to come up with the right set of types. Many examples are written showing how types almost magically make programs easier to understand. But when you read such an example what is not stated is how much effort it took to come up with just those types.

One way of thinking about it is that type-definitions are really a "second program" you must write. They check upon the primary program and validate it. But that means you must write that second program as well. It's like building an unsinkable ship with two hulls one inside the other. The quality will be great but it does cost more.

No matter what, you need a rigorous schema for your data. If you write a complex JS/Python program without doing the equivalent of "come up with the right set of types" then you will have a bad time. I'm sure in the OP here the skilled Python programmer did think carefully about the shapes of her data, she just didn't write it down.

To be sure, having to write down those data structure invariants in a rigorous way that fits into the type system of your programming language has a cost. But the hard part really is coming up with the invariants, and it's dangerous to think that dynamic languages obviate the need for that.

It's also hard to massage your invariants into a form that a type checker will accept, since you're now restricted to weird, (usually) non-Turing-complete language.

A good example of this is matrix operations - there are plenty of invariants and contracts to check (e.g. multiplication must be between m x n and n x p matrices), but I don't believe there's yet a particularly convincing Haskell matrix library, in part because the range of relevant mathematical invariants don't cleanly fit into Haskell's type system.

For those cases, checking the invariants at runtime is your escape hatch to utilize the full expressive power of the language.

This particular example can be encoded into the Haskell type system though. For example, there's a tensor library where all operations are (according to the description) checked for the correct dimensions by the type system. It seems to require a lot of type-level magic though, and that may disqualify it for "cleanly".

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/easytensor

This is an argument for more types, though, not less. Your example is trivially accomplished using dependent types.

> But the hard part really is coming up with the invariants,

Surely. But if you have to write them down it becomes hard to change them because then you will have to rewrite them, and you may need to do that many times if your initial invariants are not the final correct ones.

The initial ones are likely not to be the final correct ones because as you say coming up with the invariants is ... the hard part.

I don't think "change" is a good reason not to write them down. I think I'd rather have them written down so I have a history of those changes.

Good point. Keep them under version control.

What I'm trying to think about is that in a language that requires you to write the types down they have to be always written down correctly. So if you have to change the types you use or something about them you may have a lot of work to do because not only do you have to rewrite the types you will also have to rewrite all code that uses those types.

That does allow you to catch many errors but it can also mean a lot of extra work. The limitation is that types and executable code must always agree.

Whereas in a dynamic language you might have some parts of your program that would not even compile as such, if you used a compiler, but you don't care because you are currently focusing on another part of your program.

You want to test it fast to get fast feedback without having to make sure all parts of your program comply with the current version of your types.

A metaphor here could be something like trying to furnish a house trying out different color curtains in one room. In a statically typed language you could not see how they look and feel until all rooms have curtains of the same new color, until they all follow the same type type-constraints.

"that it takes considerable time and effort to come up with the right set of types. "

I've written once here before, this is one of the 'accidental advantages' of TypeScript: you set the compiler 'loose' when you're hacking away, writing quickly, and then 'make it more strict' as you start to consolidate your classes.

I almost don't bother to type something until I have to. Once I see it sitting there for a while, and I know it's not going to change much ... I make it a type.

It's an oddly liberating thing that I don't think was ever part of the objectives of the language, moreover, I can't think of any similar situation in other (at least mainstream) languages.

But you can basically do the same thing in Python?

Add type hints at any time, check types at any time. Type hints can also serve purely as hints to programmers and not checked at all.

You can do that in Haskell also. Just turn on the -fdefer-type-errors GHC option and leave out most of the type signatures. Any expression with a type error will be reported when/if the expression is evaluated at runtime. You'll probably still need a few type hints, to avoid ambiguity, but otherwise it's not that different from programming in a dynamically-typed language.

The takeaway for me was: "The next comparison was my friend who did a compiler on her own in Python and used less than half the code we did because of the power of metaprogramming and dynamic types."

So it's the output of ONE Python programmer vs teams of other languages programmers?

That is a good point worth emphasizing.

It is well-known that teams cause overhead. Think of the Mythical Man-Moth.

But in the end the other teams had 3 people that were able to maintain and develop their project further, if needed. The single-person team had only one such person.

But the Python code was also smaller. Easier to learn and maintain.

"Smaller code" does not mean easier to understand. It just means less characters to read. Maybe those characters are heavily loaded with meaning, as in the case with meta programing. You might need twice as much time to _understand_ the Python Code vs. the Rust code. The Rust code might be easier to extend, etc. So this is all comes to trade-offs at the end. All this being said, I'm still a huge Python enthusiast.

Smaller code may also mean more entangled and more rigid design. But that is hard to tell from just the line count.

It was also stated, though, that the reason she worked on her own was that she was a very good programmer; presumably, better than a lot of the people who worked in groups. And, as the sibling mentions, teams introduce overhead.

It's pretty clear that (like in every programming teams) the size of the output (in LoC) was linear with the number of programmers, which is something our profession should be worried about.

In my personal notion of code quality, being correct counts for a lot, and this programmer aced the tests, while apparently delivering more within the deadline that any of the multi-person teams.

While writing the previous paragraph, I wrote 'programmer' where I had previously put 'implementation', because I would guess that this study's outcome is better explained by human factors than language differences.

I share the attitudes you state in your last paragraph, but I would add that we should be skeptical of concepts of quality that seem plausible, but which lack empirical evidence for their effectiveness.

Tangentially - do you know how fast her compiler was compared to the compiled-language implementations? I have a vague sense that for many applications, interpreted languages are totally fine and reaching for a compiled language is premature optimization, but I'm curious how it actually holds up for a compiler, which is more computationally heavy than your average web app or CLI.

No I don't know how fast her compiler was. This also isn't a good setup for comparing language performance, since all the test programs were small and there was no incentive to make your compiler fast. Many groups probably used O(n^2) algorithms in their compiler and differences in algorithm choice would probably add too much noise to get a good performance signal.

That aside, speaking off the cuff totally separately from my post, I'm extremely dissatisfied with the performance of current compilers. The fastest compilers written by performance-oriented programmers can be way faster than ones you generally encounter. See luajit and Jonathan Blow's 50k+ loc/second compilers and the kind of things they do for performance. One example of a compiler task it's really difficult to do quickly in a language like Python/Ruby is non-regex parsing, I've written recursive descent parsers in Ruby and compiled languages and the Ruby ones were 1-2 orders of magnitude slower, non-JIT dynamic languages are really bad at tight loops like that.

> I'm extremely dissatisfied with the performance of current compilers. The fastest compilers written by performance-oriented programmers can be way faster than ones you generally encounter. See luajit and Jonathan Blow's 50k+ loc/second compilers and the kind of things they do for performance.

Lua and Jai are lot less complex than say C++: sure, LLVM isn't necessarily built to be the fastest compiler in existence, but I don't think it's fair to compare it to compilers for much simpler languages and bemoan its relative slowness.

Yep, the takeaway for me was that the Python project required far less code, but we're not sure how fast it ran. Further below, the author states the inputs were so small it didn't matter. What if it did? Would the Python solution still be viable?

0.5x with metaprogramming vs 0.7x without in Scala, isn't "far less". This also matches my experience - Scala is pretty on par with Python in terms of code length. It gets a tiny hit from being statically typed, but then makes up for it by having richer stdlib and powerful type-level abstractions.

I wrote the python compiler. It's very slow. With the optimizations it's probably something on the order of O(n^3) or O(n^4). One of the test cases took seconds to compile. I made no effort to optimize the compiler speed.

Less code doesn't imply lower quality code. A more expressive language + less boilerplate allow you to write high quality, readable code with fewer lines.

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