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Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

I agree. Even with excellent debugging, I think types will allow me to need to debug less. This seems ideal, because debugging means things are breaking.

Types also mean that I can describe my program in ways others can understand and trust. I don’t want to pass off potentially broken programs to other people and say don’t worry, the debugging experience is great.

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Types have always been a hard sell for me. I honestly never have issues with types being wrong when I write code, and I understand that this is missing the point. The point is that the types define a very concrete interface and we know up front when the interfaces break, and can statically check that the interface is correct everywhere.

I feel that mathematical types are so far distant from the type system of something like C or C++ that the term foot guns itself somewhat.

I've worked with too many people who insist there's nothing wrong with the way they are coding, while I've had conversations with 4 different people who have gotten tired of having to clean up after them.

I can't take anyone's word anymore that a tool is useless because they don't need it. We as humans need tons of things we pretend that we don't. It's positively pathological.

Yeah I don’t think that my point was that I don’t need types, but more closer to yours that I’ll never really have an objective way to know if I need types.

it feels like a category error of sorts too.

types describe all possible values. a debugger observes one value.

they're fundamentally different things, and are useful in different ways. sure, sometimes they overlap, but not always.

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