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Comment by __ryan__ | Hacker News Reader

  You're forced to emulate exactness by always destructuring objects - not great.

It’s almost like using objects as enumerable maps is an anti-pattern.

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The problem has nothing to do with objects. The problem is, how do you type check something like sprintf without ad hoc type rules?

I don’t think I’m following well enough to provide a meaningful response.

This is not meant as an argument against what you’re saying, because I know you were just giving an example, but I found this and thought you may find it interesting: https://www.hacklewayne.com/a-truly-strongly-typed-printf-in...

Typescript can check sprintf though using template string types: https://www.hacklewayne.com/a-truly-strongly-typed-printf-in...

Meanwhile, both Rust [1] and Haskell [2] manage to implement statically type-safe string interpolation.

[1]: https://willcrichton.net/notes/type-safe-printf/

[2]: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/formatting

Yes but the Rust example is an ad hoc type rule implemented behind the macro. You can make it type-safe but you lose the ability to have a formatting language in the string itself.

Rust has explicit support for it in the compiler, which is not great.

Zig does it the right way - it's defined in zig itself, no special cases in compiler like in Rust.

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